


Living Dead Girl

by MaCall (misterpointy)



Series: Zreaks of Nature: A Post-Apocalyptic Fairytale [1]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Disability, F/M, For Science!, Gen, Minor Character Death, POV Original Female Character, POV Third Person Plural, Present Tense, Season/Series 01, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Virology, Wordcount: Over 50.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-05-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 01:04:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 50,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9943382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misterpointy/pseuds/MaCall
Summary: “The dead are walking? I didn’t realize we would be living in a fairytale this week.”—Seanan McGuire,The Winter LongLucy Orville is the last person you’d expect to survive the zombie apocalypse—she’s fat, mobility-impaired, and incapable of functioning without her meds. So how is she going to stay alive? Well, that’s easy. Lucy is immune to zombification. Only she doesn’t know it. Yet.





	1. Call of the Zombie

**Author's Note:**

> (1) I know _The Walking Dead_ is canonically set in a universe where zombie stories don’t exist, but I’m going to ignore that because I’m a huge fan of horror movies and I think a lot of the mistakes the core group made in their approach to surviving the apocalypse could’ve been avoided if they’d been at all genre-savvy. Also, the word “zombie” predates George A. Romero’s _Night of the Living Dead_ by approximately a hundred and forty-nine years, so even if he’d never made a zombie movie people still wouldn’t’ve been calling a zombie anything but a zombie. Just saying.
> 
> (2) Lucy’s name is a twofold reference to classic horror. Series title is a reference to _Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things_ (1972). Story and and chapter titles are titles of Rob Zombie/White Zombie songs.
> 
> (3) Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or undead, is purely coincidental.
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
>    
> 

**This is the way the world ends.**  
**This is the way the world ends.**  
**This is the way the world ends,**  
**not with a bang but a whimper.**

T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. I**  
_Days Gone Bye_  
**Chapter 1**  
Call of the Zombie

* * *

_Thursday, 17 June 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 4._  
_Orlando, FL;_  
_The Magic Kingdom._

* * *

Lucy Orville is the last person you’d expect to survive the zombie apocalypse—she’s fat, mobility-impaired, and incapable of functioning without her meds. So how is she going to stay alive? Well, that’s easy. Lucy is immune to zombification. Only she doesn’t know it. Yet.

It’s been almost five months since the first zombie outbreak, but most of the world doesn’t know about that. There’s a group of virologists working on a cure for the strange virus, one unlike anything the scientific community has ever encountered before. Only they’re working out of a lab in France, too far away to help anyone who’s been infected in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or Detroit.

When the Governor of California declares a state of emergency, Lucy is throwing up pink cotton candy into the trashcan next to the spinning teacups at the Mad Tea Party. Nico is trying not to laugh at how weak her stomach is and failing epically. Kate is buying her a ridiculously overpriced bottle of Sprite, Vera is rubbing her back sympathetically as she heaves, and Cath is staring longingly at the turrets of the fairytale castle in the distance.

This is the way the world ends: with a girl at Disneyworld with her best friends.

This is the way the world ends: with a virus that spreads like wildfire.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with the walking dead.

* * *

_Tuesday, 29 June 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 16._  
_Suwanee, GA;_  
_I-85 Northbound Mile Marker 112 Rest Area._

* * *

Lucy meets Catherine Palladino during their sophomore year of high school. Cath spends the next two years stealthily finagling her into friendship, and before Lucy knows exactly what happened, they’re best friends. Nico Brewer hated Lucy when she met her during their freshman year of high school, but they became friends before graduation and they’ve been friends ever since. Katherine Driscoll has known Lucy the longest, since eighth grade; they ended up going to different high schools and they fell out of touch for a few years, but that only made their friendship stronger once they reconnected as adults. Vera Duffy met Lucy because of a referral she got for an acupuncturist from her rheumatologist, and she’s the only friend Lucy bothered to make after high school.

When she finds out most of her friends have never been to Disneyworld, Lucy decides to plan a road trip to the happiest place on earth someday. It takes nine years for them to make that teenage dream come true, but no one is too old for that kind of magic.

After she finishes grad school, Lucy gets a job working at a library in Seattle and moves into the spare room at her sister’s house in Ballard. While her sister’s house has room for Lucy herself, it doesn’t have any room for most of her stuff. So, instead of renting a storage unit or leaving everything in boxes in her parents’ basement, she buys an old-fashioned metal teardrop of a trailer and turns it into a library that contains the thousands of books she’s accumulated over years of voracious reading.

It’s Nico’s idea to hitch the trailer to her jeep and camp out instead of paying to stay at hotels for a night at a time. With three thousand miles between Seattle and Orlando, spending the money they budgeted for travel expenses on gas seems like a smart plan. While the trip is more or less a straight shot down the I-90, they end up making it a four-day drive instead of two because they stop to meet the bespectacled pink elephant in Wisconsin and take a detour to visit the Corn Palace in South Dakota. After they spend two weeks at Disneyworld, they camp out at a rest stop in Atlanta on their way back to Seattle and go into the city to buy food and water in bulk for their return trip.

Something is rotten in the state of Georgia. There are gunshots ricocheting in the distance, helicopter blades whirring overhead, people screaming and running around like flocks of headless chickens. Lucy side-eyes a tank as they drive past it and tries not to have a panic attack as its turret pivots slowly to point at her trailer before it swivels the other way. There’s a massive pileup on the I-85 out of the city once they get back on the highway. Panic is fulminating like an electric charge in the palpably unquiet air. Nico drives on the side of the road for a few miles before she takes an exit and turns back to that rest stop.

While they’re setting up camp, the army firebombs the city in a futile attempt to contain the outbreak that started at Harrison Memorial Hospital. Lucy stumbles out of her trailer and drops her cane as she watches the city go up in flames. It makes a hollow metallic noise that fades out while Atlanta burns.

* * *

“What…” Nico stops pitching her tent and swallows hard before she stops crouching and rises to her feet. “What the hell was that?”

“It’s all over the news,” Vera says, her voice flat and numb. “We saw it two weeks ago when Conan the Barbarian declared a state of emergency in California. We laughed about how absurd the idea of a zombie apocalypse was.”

“We were wrong,” Cath says, shaking her head slowly. “We were so wrong.”

“Wait,” Kate says incredulously. “This is real? This is really happening?”

“It’s real,” Lucy whispers, “the dead are walking.”

* * *

_Saturday, 3 July 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 20._  
_Suwanee, GA;_  
_I-85 Northbound Mile Marker 112 Rest Area._

* * *

It takes a few days of watching the horror stories on the news for them to decide they can’t just sit around doing nothing. Lucy calls her parents and gets through to them because the infection hasn’t overrun her small hometown, but they can’t reach her brothers in San Francisco or her sister in Seattle. Cath reaches her parents, but not her husband, who went to Bonnaroo in Manchester a few weeks ago and had planned on meeting them in Atlanta the next day. Kate can’t get ahold of anyone at Fort Lewis, the military base where her husband is stationed; or anyone at Fort Hood, where he went for training a few days before they started road tripping. When she tries to call her mother, her stepdad picks up the phone—but all she hears on the other end are low, heartbreaking groans. Cell towers are down in Idaho, so Vera doesn’t know if her family is alive or dead or worse.

“We need weapons,” Nico insists. “We need to fight back.”

“We can’t go home,” Lucy adds softly. “We couldn’t all survive the trip, not with the world overrun by zombies. It’s us against the undead population of a major city. I don’t like those odds.”

“But the power’s still on,” Cath argues, “and there’s still cell service. We can’t be the only survivors.”

“No one picks up when I dial 9-1-1,” Lucy retorts. “No cops. No fire department. No local offices of any federal government agencies with initialisms. All of the news broadcasts we’ve seen are coming from somewhere else. Atlanta fell when they bombed the city four days ago. Internet isn’t down yet because it’s part of a global network, but it’s only a matter of time before it’s gone too. I sent a mass e-mail to everyone we know three days ago. No one is answering, so either they can’t get to a computer because they’re on the move, or they can’t get to a computer because they’re dead. I don’t want to believe that, but if we’re ever going to find out, we need to stay alive.”

“We’re going to need more food eventually,” Vera points out. “We don’t have to worry about the power going out because the trailer has solar paneling, but that won’t keep us from starving to death.”

Lucy turns to look at Nico. “Have I told you lately that I’m eternally grateful for your electrical engineering skills?” she asks. While replacing the siding on the trailer with solar paneling to cut back on her sister’s power bill was Lucy’s idea, she wouldn’t have been able to do it without Nico’s help.

Nico shrugs and smiles in spite of how overwhelmingly bad things are. It doesn’t feel entirely real to any of them yet. “Well,” she says, “you could say it more often. I mean, I did build you a solar-powered water heater, too.”

Lucy cocks her head slantwise as a silver lining occurs to her. “I guess if the world ends we won’t have to pay back our student loans,” she quips.

Cath giggles. “Oh my god,” she wheezes, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Lucy snorts. It’s easier to laugh than to cry or break down. When you have an anxiety disorder, you learn that lesson the hard way. Cath knows that as well as she does. It’s one of the reasons they’re best friends.

“Nico’s right,” Kate says. “We need weapons. We all know how to shoot, but I’m the only one who has a gun, and I only have nine bullets.”

“I’ve got my knife,” Nico interjects, “but I don’t want to get close enough to the zombies to get infected and that means I can’t go around stabbing them in the eyeballs.”

“There’s a mall about thirty miles from where we are,” Lucy informs them, “we could get everything we need in one place.”

“Okay,” says Vera, “nine bullets should be enough to get at least one of us through the zombie horde outside the trailer and into Nico’s jeep so we can get the fuck out of here.”

Nico shrugs and hands over her keys to Kate, who puts on a heavy leather jacket over her t-shirt and jeans before she clicks the safety off her gun. Then she ducks through the door and slams it behind her. Kate shoots two zombies in the head before she scrambles into the driver’s seat and speeds onto the highway, zigzagging between the cars abandoned on the way out of the city and pulling a U-turn to get back on the empty stretch of road shooting for Atlanta.

“Get in, loser…” Lucy mutters under her breath, “…we’re going shopping.”


	2. Girl on Fire

**Nothing’s ever real until it’s real.**

George A. Romero

* * *

 _Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. I**  
_Days Gone Bye_  
**Chapter 2**  
Girl on Fire

* * *

 _Saturday, 3 July 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 20._  
_Marietta, GA;_  
_Fourth Armory._

* * *

Kate stops at a guns and ammo store on their way to the mall. It’s a survivalist paradise full of rifles, handguns, accessories, and assorted knives with sheathes. Lucy finds two .38 special revolvers with comfortable triggers and clips a pair of OWB holsters to the belt around her waist. Then she fills a diaphanous canvas bag with all of the .38 special rounds in the store and hobbles back outside to guard the trailer while everyone else chooses their weapons. Cath finds a semiautomatic pistol that feels good in her hands. Nico loads an assortment of hunting rifles into the back of her jeep. Kate reloads her Walther P99 and stuffs a multitude of replacement clips into her wholesale designer handbag.

“We are winning at the apocalypse,” Vera says.

“Famous last words,” Lucy retorts.

* * *

 _Saturday, 3 July 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 20._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Cumberland Mall._

* * *

When the girls arrive at the mall they find the aftermath of a massacre. There are bodies piled up all over the parking lot. Upon closer inspection, they were shot in the back of the head execution style and left to rot. While the building itself is intact because the bombers weren’t aiming for it, the streets that surround the mall are filled with debris and dead things. Lucy chokes and bites down on the inside of her cheek in a futile attempt to stop the nausea that churns through her from the smell of putrefaction alone. Cath gasps and covers her mouth with one hand. Nico swallows hard and puts one hand on her shoulder as she wraps the other around the hilt of the hilt of her knife. Vera looks around, wide-eyed and horrified.

Kate hands the keys to the jeep back over to Nico and turns to look at Lucy. “I know you made a list of things we need,” she says, “can I see it?”

Lucy extracts a small notebook from her pocket and flips it open to her looting list. Kate takes the notebook and adds a few things to the list before she passes it along to Cath, to Nico, to Vera so they can make additions of their own as they circumnavigate the carnage to find the main entrance. It’s open, because nobody bothers to lock up during the apocalypse. Lucy gnaws on her thumbnail and tries not to wince at how loudly her cane echoes against the linoleum floor with every step she takes.

 _I don’t walk_ , she thinks. _I shuffle like one of George Romero’s zombies. If anyone here is capable of surviving the end of the world, it’s not me_.

There’s no one inside, dead or alive. Which is worse, in a way, because malls aren’t meant to sit empty during the daytime. It looks like other looters haven’t come through here, probably because most of the people who lived or worked in the area either got infected or they evacuated before the bombs dropped with no intention of ever coming back. There’s a map of the mall by the food court near the main entrance showing the layout of the massive building.

“Should we split up?” Vera wonders. “I know the girls who go off on their own always die in the movies, but we should be fine in groups of two or three.”

“It’s a two-story mall,” Lucy side-eyes the eerily unmoving escalator, “and I’m not going upstairs.”

“There’s an acupressure spa on Level 2,” Vera says. “I want to see if I can find acupuncture supplies. I only brought enough needles to give you a couple treatments, and I’m out.”

“There’s also a Buckle on Level 2,” Kate adds, “and I can finally afford their prices now that everything is free.”

“Torrid’s on Level 1,” Lucy says, “and if I’m going to survive the zombies I need clothes that actually fit me.”

“Okay.” Nico squares her shoulders. “We split up with me, Lucy, and Cath on Level 1 and Kate and Vera on Level 2, and meet at Costco in about an hour.”

Cath smiles with forced brightness and nods, a quick bob of her head. “Let’s do this,” she says.

* * *

It may be self-indulgent of Lucy to steal a plethora of plus-size clothes and lingerie from Torrid, but comfy bras are a bare necessity for anyone with big tits, and she doesn’t want to run out of clean underwear at the end of the world. There’s a giddy sort of pragmatism that comes with survival, and Lucy was a survivor before everything went to hell in a handbasket. Dating two emotionally abusive guys and getting raped by one of them does that to a girl.

 _Good thing Cumberland Mall doesn’t have a Barnes and Noble_ , she thinks. _There’s no room for more books in the trailer, but that wouldn’t stop me from trying to steal all of the free books I could find_.

After they’re done looting the mall, things go horribly wrong. While the girls are at Costco, an undead mall cop shambles up behind Vera in the aisle with the bulk Nutella and takes a bite out of the meat of her shoulder. Lucy grabs the zombie by the sleeve of his uniform and he whirls to sink his teeth into her forearm. Nico shoots him in the back of the head a split second later, but it’s too late.

Vera screams as blood spurts out from the wound and tries to apply pressure with her hands. “I’m dead,” she whispers shakily. “Oh, my god. I’m dead…” she turns to look at Lucy, “…we’re so dead.”

 _Famous last words_ , Lucy thinks as she watches her blood dripping onto the linoleum floor. Cath tears open a package of paper towels and hands her a roll. Lucy wipes the blood and brain spatter off with a grim expression before she extracts her first-aid kid from her purse to disinfect and bandage the wound. It won’t keep her from amplifying, but going through the motions is better than having a meltdown.

Nico looks at the fresh bite on her arm and shakes her head so fast she almost discombobulates herself. “No,” she blurts out, “this can’t be happening. _No_.”

“It’s a supervirus,” Kate says, “that’s what the World Health Organization said. There’s no way biting is the primary vector, or the virus couldn’t have spread fast enough to wipe out most of the major cities in the world. It’s probably airborne, or something in the water supply, but my point is that getting bitten doesn’t mean they’re going to die.”

“Yeah,” Cath says quietly, “but they also said the virus has a one hundred percent fatality rate. So anyone who gets infected will die between a few hours and a few days after they’re exposed to a live strain of the supervirus, even through a secondary vector like getting bitten by one of the infected.”

“We’ve all been exposed,” Lucy points out sharply, “but Vera and I are going to die no matter what. There’s a chance you won’t, if you leave us here.”

Cath narrows her eyes and gives Lucy an incredulous look. “I can’t survive the apocalypse without you,” she says in a quiet, broken voice.

Lucy bites her lip and swallows thickly to stop herself from crying. “Hey,” she tries to smile and fails miserably, “remember that bet we had going? I bet that you’d be married before we were thirty, and I won.”

Cath sniffles. “I bet that you weren’t going to die a virgin,” she exhales a trembling puff of laughter, “and you’re such a sore loser that of course you’re going to die to win both the bets we made in high school.”

Lucy shrugs. “I am what I am,” she says.

* * *

 _Saturday, 3 July 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 21._  
_Marietta, GA;_  
_I-75 Horace E. Tate Freeway._

* * *

When the Governor of California declares a state of emergency on the fourth day of the global outbreak, Merle Dixon is locked in a holding cell at the Fulton County Jail and Daryl Dixon is arguing with the sheriff about how high the bastards set his brother’s bail. Then a drunk frat boy in the cell next door starts throwing up before he blacks out, chokes on his own vomit, and dies. Daryl has to leave to get enough money to bail Merle out. When he comes back, the county jail is full of the walking dead.

It takes some doing to get Merle out of that sticky situation alive, but that’s what Daryl does: he sticks with his brother no matter what. Asshole’s just lucky Daryl keeps the Horton Scout HD 125 that he uses for bowhunting in his truck. Or his brother would be dinner for some undead fuckers right now instead of bitching about his bike getting impounded by the cops because he got arrested for driving under the influence.

Merle gets his bike out of the impound lot during the chaos that ensues while the army tries to evacuate the denizens of Atlanta, before they decide the city is a lost cause. Daryl suggests they set up camp in Mountain Park. There’s a freshwater spring, and a wildlife refuge where they can hunt their own food, and houses sitting empty in the aftermath of the evacuation where they can hole up until this all blows over. Daryl should’ve known that if it seems too good to be true, then it’s probably a lie. Mountain Park is overrun with zombies by the time the brothers arrive, two days after Atlanta falls.

It’s Merle’s idea to loot the abandoned cars on the highway out of the city, stealing nonperishable food and siphoning gas. While they’re doing that, they see a red Jeep Grand Cherokee with a shiny trailer attached drive into the city. Daryl shakes his head and grunts as he lifts a full canister of gas into the back of his truck.

 _Anyone dumb enough to drive into the city instead of getting the hell out of dodge is gonna have adapt to survive or die like a dumbass_ , he thinks.

It’s a welcome surprise to see that red jeep driving back up the interstate at breakneck speed.

 _Like a bat outta hell_ , Daryl thinks. It’s the first time he’s laughed at anything in front of Merle without forcing himself in years.

* * *

 _Sunday, 4 July 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 21._  
_Suwanee, GA;_  
_I-85 Mile Marker 112 Northbound Rest Area_.

* * *

It takes six hours for Vera to die. While her body tries to fight off the infection, her fever spikes high enough to burn her out. It’s impossible for high fevers to cause permanent brain damage without external factors, but this virus has made the impossible a horrifying reality in more ways than one. Vera’s body temperature reaches 111 °F before she abruptly stops breathing. When she opens her eyes, for a few seconds they can almost pretend she’s going to be okay. Until they see that her eyes are a faded milky white, her pupils glossed over and bleakly obscured by death. Cath volunteers to take her outside and shoot her so she won’t have to do the same for Lucy. It’s this moment—the moment of holding a gun to the head of a woman she was laughing with earlier that day and pulling the trigger—that makes the end of the world all too real for her.

Lucy’s fever hits 104 °F, but doesn’t go any higher. After she falls asleep during what she calls the fuck off hours of the morning, her fever breaks. When she wakes up late in the afternoon, she’s alone in the trailer and Nico is staring at her with a grave sort of expectancy.

“I’m alive,” she whispers, her throat raw and dry from sleeping with her mouth open. “Hey, Nico—”

Nico holds up the thermometer Lucy keeps in her first-aid kit. “I took your temperature five minutes ago,” she says. “It’s 97.9 degrees.”

“I run cold,” Lucy mumbles before she reaches for a plastic bottle of water and takes a long drink, “you know that.”

Nico watches Lucy drink half the contents of the water bottle and looks at the bandage on her forearm. There’s a faint red stain, but she’s not even bleeding anymore. Lucy is _healing_. Which is something an infected person can’t do. “It’s too early to tell,” she says, “but I think you might be immune to the zombie virus.”

Lucy snorts. “I’m immunocompromised,” she points out. “I’m the last person who should be able to fight off a live infection of any virus, let alone a supervirus that makes people get up and walk around like something out of _Night of the Living Dead_ after they die from the infection.”

“If you were trying to fight off a live infection, you’d still be running a fever, but you’re not,” Nico retorts, “nobody in those news reports got better after they got infected, but that doesn’t mean nobody _can_. I mean, you’ve been fighting off every new strain of the flu and a bunch of other random viral infections at least once a month for nine years. What if that means you’ve built up enough antibodies to survive this supervirus?”

Lucy gnaws on her left thumbnail without biting through it and changes the subject. “Where are Cath and Kate?” she asks.

“Kate took Cath back to Atlanta,” Nico informs her, “so they could try to find a pet store and save a puppy from the zombies.”

Lucy snorts. “If she finds a pet store she’s going to bring back all of the dogs,” she says, “ _all of them_.”

Nico grins and taps the radio earpiece she stole when she looted the Best Buy at Cumberland Mall. “Cath said to tell you that you can’t die because she found you a corgi,” she says.

Lucy bites her lip and tries not to squee. Or burst into tears. Or both. Then, someone makes the mistake of trying to open the door without knocking first and screams.

* * *

It’s Merle’s idea to rob the owner of the red jeep and its trailer, of course. Daryl reluctantly tracks the jeep to one of the rest areas off I-85, parks his truck on the interstate among the abandoned cars and hunkers down until the jeep drives away, and finds the trailer parked next to a pile of smoldering zombies. Merle slinks over to the trailer and grabs the door handle. Then he screams like a stuck pig and his eyes roll back in his head before he collapses into a heap of bad decisions and denim.

Daryl aims his crossbow at the trailer as the door opens to reveal a girl in a skimpy black camisole that doesn’t match her prudishly long floral print skirt. There’s a pair of revolvers holstered to the wide studded belt around her thick waist, a bandage on her left forearm, and a brace on her right wrist. Daryl frowns at the chunky plastic frames of her glasses, her plump face, her button nose, her pretty mouth, the copper glint in her frizzy brown hair.

 _What the hell is a girl who looks like the cutest librarian I ever saw doing out here in the middle of the apocalypse?_ he thinks and shakes his head without taking his eyes off of her. _Get ahold of yourself, Dixon. Whoever she is, she hurt Merle, and Merle is all you’ve got_.

Daryl aims his crossbow at her heart and hopes like hell that he won’t have to shoot her. “Who the hell’re you and what the hell did you do to my brother?” he snarls.


	3. Sick Bubblegum

**Life’s more fun when you take the chance that it might end.**

Mira Grant, _Deadline_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. I**  
_Days Gone Bye_  
**Chapter 3**  
Sick Bubblegum

* * *

_Sunday, 4 July 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 21._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_I-85 Northbound Mile Marker 112 Rest Area._

* * *

When she opens the door of her trailer, Lucy comes face to face with a man wearing frayed jeans and a loose tank top that has faded from its original black to a dark shade of gray. Oh, and he’s pointing a loaded crossbow at her throat. Lucy forces herself to look him in the eyes, even though she’s too autistic to make eye contact most of the time. When he meets her gaze, she notices that his eyes are an intense shade of blue, and that he’s looking right at her. Like a hunter looks at prey.

“Who the hell’re you and what the hell did you do t’ my brother?” he asks, tone harsh and loud and biting.

Lucy tenses automatically through her shoulders and glances at the other man, who’s lying face down in the dirt. “It’s okay,” she tells him. “I have this friend who’s an electrical engineer and she had an idea to put a joy buzzer on the door, only she modified the device to shock anyone who tried to open the door without doing the secret knock first unconscious. It wasn’t a fatal electric current. He’ll live. He probably crapped his pants, though. When people get electrocuted, they empty their bladders, and as for me…” she pauses to exhale a vociferous whoosh of air, “…I’m Lucy Orville. Who the hell are you?”

“Dixon,” he says brusquely. “Daryl Dixon.”

 _Bond, James Bond_ , Lucy thinks, _if 007 were a redneck_. “It’s nice to meet you, Daryl,” she says out loud. “So,” she ekes the _oh s_ ound out into an _ooh_ , “why don’t you tell me what you and your brother were trying to break into my trailer for?”

Daryl huffs indignantly. “We weren’t tryin’ to break in,” he says. “We thought somebody must’ve left it here. We didn’t think anybody else had survived.”

Lucy adjusts her glasses and cocks her head owlishly. It’s obvious that he’s lying through his teeth even to someone as socially challenged as her, but her gut is telling her that he’s not here to hurt her or her friends. Which is odd, because she doesn’t trust men willy-nilly and this man is pointing a loaded crossbow at her—but he doesn’t make her feel threatened at all. “Well,” she tells him, “I always survive, and I’m not alone.”

When she lets the door swing all the way open, Daryl tears his gaze away from Lucy and sees another woman aiming an assault rifle at his head. Nico has warm brown skin, a fall of black hair curling softly over her shoulders and down to the small of her back, and viciously bright green eyes. It’s hard to deduce her ethnicity by looking at her, but she’s a quarter Japanese and three quarters white—she’s just not white-passing. There are muscles flexing visibly in her powerful upper arms, her grip on the rifle not wavering for a second as she keeps him in her sights.

“Hi,” she says.

“Who the hell’re you?” Daryl wants to know.

“I’m Nico Brewer,” she tells him in a cheerful voice with a violent undertone, “and I will not hesitate to shoot you in the face if you don’t stop pointing that thing at Lucy.”

Nico arches her dark eyebrows at him as she slides her finger onto the trigger to show him that she isn’t making idle threats. Daryl narrows his eyes at her before he makes a disgruntled noise and lowers the crossbow. Lucy smiles at him and his heart does something funny in his chest that makes him frown as she hobbles down the metal set of steps attached to the side of the trailer and pokes his brother with her cane.

Daryl didn’t notice her cane before. It’s black with prismatic stickers on the shaft that glitter in the sunlight. When she squats next to his brother, she shifts her weight off of her left ankle before she wrinkles her nose at the acrid stench of piss wafting up from the unconscious Merle. Daryl cocks his head and tries to read the words tattooed on the freckled curve of her right shoulder, but they’re in a language that he doesn’t know. There’s another tattoo on the back of her neck, a horned owl inked in black with intense yellow eyes and a harvest moon behind its head.

Nico lowers her rifle and taps her earpiece. “Kate and Cath met someone in Atlanta,” she tells Lucy, “he says he and a group of other survivors set up camp at some quarry a few miles from downtown. Apparently they’re bringing him here and he’s going to show us how to get there.”

“Who’re they?” Daryl asks.

“Like she said.” Nico props the rifle against the doorframe and folds her arms. “We’re not alone. Kate and Cath are our friends.”

 _There are four of ’em?_ Daryl thinks incredulously. _How’d four girls from up North wind up here in Georgia at the end of the world?_

Lucy glances at him as she rises to her feet. “I think you and your brother should come too,” she says, “no one should be alone during the end times.”

“Yeah,” Daryl mutters as heat creeps up the back of his neck. Good thing it’s hot as hell outside, or he’d think he was blushing for some other reason.

Lucy smiles at him almost shyly. “Okay,” she says.

Daryl can’t stop himself from staring at her as she hobbles back inside the trailer and tries to ignore how fast his heart is beating. Nico offers to help him haul Merle back to his truck and helps him lift the bike—a 1966 Triumph Bonneville TR6C—into the back of his truck with the canisters of gas he and Merle collected the day before. It weighs over three hundred pounds, but that’s on the lighter side for a motorcycle and Nico is strong for a girl. Daryl doesn’t bother to make small talk and soon enough she’s walking back to the trailer to wait for her friends to return.

Merle reeks of piss and shit and he has no idea where they’re going to get another pair of pants for him to wear. Asshole’s probably going to make him give up his other pair of jeans.

Daryl sighs as a tall brunette in jeans and a leather jacket hops out of the jeep and gives the keys to Nico before she hitches the trailer to its rear. It has a Washington state license plate, proof that they’re from about as far north as you can get without going across the border into beaver and moose country. There’s an Asian guy in the passenger seat, wearing a baseball cap that makes him look younger than he probably is, and another girl in the backseat with a mutt sitting next to her; its tongue is lolling out of its mouth happily.

Lucy hobbles out of the trailer and says something to the girl in the backseat, who smiles and hands her a pudgy corgi puppy through the rear window. When she tucks her cane in the crook of her elbow and lets the puppy lick her face, Daryl smiles.

Merle, of course, wakes up just as the jeep drives away. “What the hell…?” he groans. “Where the fuck did that trailer go?”

* * *

_Sunday, 4 July 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 21._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

It’s sunset by the time the girls arrive at the quarry and meet the other survivors. There are twenty-one people at the campsite, a mix of families who got out of the city alive and sole survivors who lost the people they loved in the first week of the worldwide outbreak.

Glenn, who volunteered to go on a supply run alone because he knows the topography of the city better than anyone, is a second-generation Korean-American from Michigan who moved to Atlanta for college and kept working as a pizza deliveryman after he graduated. When the world ended, he was still looking for another job. Theodore is a friend of his from college, a black man with a disarming smile who asks the girls to call him T-Dog. Andrea and Amy are sisters born twelve years apart who joined the group a few days before the girls did along with Dale, a widower who planned a cross-country trip in his RV and decided to take the trip by himself after she died of cancer. Lori is a widowed housewife with a twelve-year-old son named Carl. Shane is a former sheriff’s deputy whose best friend was Lori’s husband Rick, but the way he watches her is less friendly and more badly concealed lust. Carol is a diminutive housewife with a twelve-year-old daughter named Sophia and a husband named Ed who wears a perpetually sour expression. Lucy can see the signs of abuse in the hunch of her shoulders, the way her smile is like a fracture of light in a dark place, and how she puts herself in the space between her husband and their daughter.

 _I wonder if any of them are immune_ , Lucy thinks as she lets Sophia pet her new corgi, _or maybe I’m just a freak of nature_.

* * *

_Monday, 12 July 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 29._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

Lucy spends her first week at the quarry going through caffeine withdrawal from the lack of Dr. Pepper in the apocalypse. Romero the corgi, nicknamed Romy by Sophia about two seconds after Lucy tells her what to call the puppy, cuddles up with her on the pillow-top mattress that takes up most of the back end of her trailer. While she tries to sleep off a migraine, her friends settle into roles within the group. Cath, who loved hiking and camping with her husband, uses a guidebook Lucy stole to identify and collect a surplus of plants both edible and medicinal from the forest park surrounding the quarry. Kate, who’s an herbalist, finds ways to use those plants. Nico becomes the go-to getaway driver for Glenn whenever he goes on a supply run. Which he does at least once a week.

After two days of Lucy staying inside with the windows obscured, Ed starts banging on the walls and yelling at her to stop being lazy. Carol flinches at the sound of him raising his voice, but doesn’t intervene. Nico draws her knife from the sheath attached to her belt and she’s walking over to have words with Ed when Daryl puts a hand on his shoulder and gives him a warning look.

“Why don’t you back the hell off?” Daryl murmurs in a low, threatening voice. “Lucy’s hurt, not lazy. Leave her be.”

Ed huffs, but it’s been a week and a day since the Dixon brothers joined the group and he knows better than to pick a fight with one of them by now. “No point in letting that fat cunt stay here if she’s not gonna pull her weight,” he mutters under his breath.

Nico spins the hilt of her knife between her fingers and presses the sharp end of the blade against the flab of his neck before he knows it. “Say that again,” she tells him so calmly that he knows he fucked up.

Daryl snorts as Nico makes the asshole sweat and walks over to the door before he knocks, gently. When she opens it, Lucy is flushed and underdressed in a camisole and baggy shorts over floral print leggings and boots. Daryl watches a drop of sweat drizzle from her collarbone down between her breasts and looks away guiltily. Lucy is twenty-six. While she’s not young enough that him being attracted to her would be totally inappropriate, he doubts she wants a forty-one-year-old man staring at her tits.

“Hey,” he says. “I brought ya’ somethin’.”

Lucy eyes the bottle of tiny yellow pills that he’s holding out to her tentatively. Like an offering. “What is that?” she wants to know.

“Oxy,” Daryl says.

Lucy arches her eyebrows at him. “Oxycodone hydrochloride?” she says.

Daryl nods curtly. “Yeah.”

Lucy glances down at the bottle of pills, still dangling from his fingertips. “Why do you have an addictive opioid?” she asks.

Daryl shrugs instead of answering the question because he doesn’t want to tell her that he and Merle used to sell drugs. Or that he and Merle have a stash for their own personal use. “I just thought it might help,” he mumbles, “ya’ know, with the pain.”

Lucy smiles at him and his heart does the same funny stuttering thing it does whenever he looks at her. “Thank you,” she tells him softly, “but I’d rather take painkillers that aren’t addictive. Kate is taking me downtown to loot a pharmacy so I can refill my prescriptions.”

Daryl tries not to feel disappointed as Kate emerges from the woods and hands her bucket full of flora and fauna to Cath before she walks over to stand on the opposite side of the doorway. Daryl abruptly walks away without saying goodbye, hunching his shoulders like he’s trying to make himself look smaller. Lucy watches him go and hopes she didn’t hurt his feelings.

“Hey,” Kate says, “you ready yet?”

Lucy nods, a quick bob of her head. “Yeah,” she says. “Let’s go.”


	4. The Beginning of the End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : There is a discussion of ableist slurs, autism, and references to past emotional and physical abuse as well as past sexual assault in this chapter. Beware.

**Days grow hotter and life grows shorter. Time is somehow running out.**

Toby Barlow, _Sharp Teeth_

* * *

 _Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. I**  
_Days Gone Bye_  
**Chapter 4**  
The Beginning of the End

* * *

 _Wednesday, 14 July 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 30._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

Daryl gets up before the asscrack of dawn every morning to check the snares he set in the woods and go hunting for game that’s too smart to get caught in one of his traps. When he returns to the campsite, he sees Merle with Lucy. Daryl has a visceral _aw hell no_ response—a tight feeling that snarls in his gut like some wild animal—until something incredible happens. Merle smarmily says something to her that Daryl is too far away to hear and she _laughs_. Lucy laughs so hard she doubles over and sits in the dirt as she wheezes uncontrollably.

Merle scoffs and folds his arms. “What’re ya’, retarded or somethin’?” he asks.

Lucy stops laughing abruptly and glares at him. “Don’t call me that,” she bites out. “Don’t call anyone that.”

Merle snorts. “Whatever,” he says.

“No,” Lucy snaps. “It’s not. Do you want to know why I laughed at you? I laughed at you because the idea of having sex with you is hilarious to me in the worst way. I bet you expect blowjobs, but you won’t eat pussy. I doubt you even know what a clitoris is. I deserve better than you and I would rather die a virgin than let you touch me.”

Merle doesn’t get a chance to respond to that because she uses her cane to get back on her feet and hobbles away, leaving him to ferment in his impotent rage. Daryl blanks hard and fast as soon as his brother looks his way and clears his throat so Merle won’t see that he was smiling and kick his ass for it later.

Daryl has seen his brother get rejected many times over the years. Whenever they would go out drinking, he’d get at least one glass of wine or fruity cocktail thrown in his face before he got lucky. None of those girls stuck around long enough to explain why they didn’t want to fuck Merle, though. When he follows Lucy to her trailer, Daryl can’t decide whether he wants to defend his brother or protect her from him. “So what,” he says, “you think you’re better’n me and my brother ’cause we’re a couple of white trash hicks from Georgia?”

Lucy heaves a sigh before she turns to look at him. “No,” she tells him softly. “When I said I deserve better I didn’t mean I’m better than you. I meant that I’ve been a virgin for almost twenty-seven years and I’ve had time to figure out what I want and what I don’t. When I have sex for the first time, I want it to be with someone who loves and respects me. Merle doesn’t respect women or disabled people and I’m a disabled woman,” she cocks her head and flails one hand at her cane, “you do the math. I don’t think you’re trash. I just don’t want to make my sexual debut with someone who uses ableist slurs.”

“What,” Daryl folds his arms and frowns so hard the space between his eyebrows furrows, “retarded?”

Lucy winces. “Yes,” she says.

“Sorry,” Daryl mutters. “I won’t say it again. I just don’t understand why it bugs ya’.”

Lucy moves to sit on the steps of her trailer and looks up into his eyes. “I’m not just physically disabled,” she explains. “I’m also neuroatypical and mentally ill. I have an anxiety disorder and clinical depression, and I’m autistic. I take medication for anxiety and depression. Those were the prescriptions Kate and I went to refill yesterday during our pharmacy run. I didn’t know I was autistic until I was twenty-four and I didn’t want to admit it for years before that because I didn’t want people to use words like that slur against _me_. I remember the first time my brother used it,” she shakes her head and exhales a soft whoosh of air, “he was seven. I was ten. I guess he must’ve learned it from other kids in his class at school, and he said it during family dinner one night. Our dad works…” she swallows hard, “…he worked with developmentally disabled kids. I’ve only heard him raise his voice four times and that was the second. Our mom was the one who yelled. Our dad was always quiet, but him being quietly disappointed in you could be worse than her yelling and getting it out of her system. I’d only heard him raise his voice once until that night and I’d never seen him get mad over a word before.”

“Did he hit your brother for sayin’ it?” Daryl wants to know.

Lucy shakes her head again. “No,” she adjusts her glasses and looks at him like she can see right through him. “Did your father hit you and your brother?” she asks.

Daryl shrugs instead of answering the question. “Gotta take a piss,” he mutters before he turns and walks away.

* * *

Daryl is a scrapper and a survivor, but he’s not much of a talker. Lucy is a woman who knows how to use her words. There’s a fierce intelligence in her and it shows itself whenever she opens her mouth. Merle thinks she talks too much. Which hasn’t stopped him from calling her a rugmuncher or bitching about how uptight she is. Lucy doesn’t seem uptight to Daryl, though; the way he sees it, any woman who brings up blowjobs and eating pussy to win an argument isn’t exactly a prude. Lucy is also a virgin, a fact Daryl can’t stop thinking about no matter how hard he tries. While he’s not as into meaningless one-night stands as Merle is, he’s about as far from virginal as you can get.

When he was fifteen, Daryl had a crush on a Cherokee boy from Screamer Mountain; but he didn’t have the words to articulate that he liked boys the same way he liked girls, and even if he’d known the word “bisexual” he couldn’t have talked to Merle or anyone else about it. Daryl thinks he could talk to Lucy, though. What she said about not wanting slurs applied to her was how he felt at the time, how he still feels whenever Merle says “gay” like it’s a bad word.

It’s dark by the time he returns to camp. There’s a low fire burning in one of the pits, an elusive glow flickering over the contours of the assortment of tents and vehicles scattered haphazardly around the campsite. Lucy is sitting by the campfire with her friends—they’re making s’mores with graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate left over from the stash of snacks they packed for their ill-fated adventure to Disneyworld—but that changes as soon as she sees him. Daryl slings his crossbow over his shoulder as Lucy shuffles over to where he’s suddenly rooted to the spot, waiting.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I barely know you. Whatever has happened to you is your business, not mine. I had no right to ask that question.”

Daryl shrugs and stuffs his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “I don’t talk about it,” he says. “Merle doesn’t know.”

Lucy bites her lip and ducks her head in a nod, short but sweet. “I was raped,” she says. “I was sixteen. I didn’t talk about it for almost two years, after. I also had an abusive boyfriend and I kept telling myself it wasn’t an abusive relationship because he never hit me…he just manipulated me emotionally until I hated myself and it took everything I had to leave.”

Daryl narrows his eyes at her as comprehension dawns. Lucy didn’t just take a shot in the dark—she’s a survivor, too. _Guess we’ve got more in common than I thought_ , he thinks. _Maybe that’s why I can’t get this girl outta my head_.

Lucy smiles at him almost shyly. “What’s happened to you isn’t who you are,” she says. “You don’t get to choose the things you go through. You do get to choose how to heal.”

Daryl swallows hard as she shuffles away. Until that moment he didn’t know those were the words he needed to hear.

* * *

 _Saturday, 17 July 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 34._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

Daryl leaves his tent and pauses to inhale the smell of bacon grease and syrup before he sniffs it out. Lucy is making breakfast for everyone in her solar-powered kitchen with its tiny stove, two burners and a small oven big enough to fit a casserole dish inside without a lid. There’s bacon frying in one skillet and pancakes cooking in the other. Sophia and Carl are chowing down on short stacks of pancakes and strips of bacon already.

“Internet went down this morning,” Lucy tells him as she flips a pancake. “I haven’t heard from my parents and I probably never will.”

Daryl watches her move to whisk a bowl of yellow goop he assumes is scrambled eggs. “Where’d you get all this stuff?” he asks.

“I had it,” Lucy tells him. “I wasn’t living in this trailer pre-apocalypse, but I used it for storage and I bought all my nonperishable groceries in bulk. I took a lot of stuff out before the trip. I just thought it’d be nice to have pancakes while we were camping. Bisquick and Mrs. Butterworth’s last forever. I’m just happy the fridge runs on solar energy, or the butter would’ve melted days ago.”

Daryl flicks his gaze to the small refrigerator under the counter before he ducks inside the trailer and snatches a strip of bacon right out of the frying pan.

Lucy turns to look at him over her shoulder and huffs. “I can give you a plate,” she points out.

Daryl shrugs. “I don’t mind gettin’ my hands dirty,” he says.

After she rolls her eyes at him, Daryl steals a few more strips of bacon and wraps them in a pancake on his way out of the trailer. It takes him all day to admit to himself that he was flirting with her and she didn’t even notice.

* * *

 _Saturday, 31 July 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 48._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

After the power grid fails, more survivors trickle into their camp. Morales fled Atlanta with his wife Miranda and their children Eliza and Louis, who make friends with Sophia and Carl within five minutes of meeting them. Jacqui and Jim are sole survivors. There are others, but Lucy doesn’t spend enough time with them to learn their names. Kate is trying not to dwell on the sheer terror of not knowing what happened to her husband or their families. Nico starts working on fixing a busted old radio salvaged from an abandoned car on the highway in the unlikely event that another survivor is broadcasting an important message. Cath has been crossing off days on a calendar she found at Costco.

It’s only a matter of time before the hazy post-apocalyptic days start blurring into an endless monotony of sweat, laundry, and heat rashes. Lucy has been wearing long-sleeved shirts to hide the bite marks on her arms—one from the day that Vera died and the other from the day Kate drove her into the city to raid the pharmacy—even though the temperature has been sitting uncomfortably at ninety degrees every day for the past month. It was worth getting bitten a second time, though. There was no other way to test her immunity. Lucy is a librarian, an information scientist, and a scientist can only conclusively prove a hypothesis by replicating the results of the original experiment.

Glenn knocks on the open doorway of her trailer and smiles at her as soon as she looks up from her book. “Hey,” he says. “Happy birthday.”

When he opens the cooler he’s carrying to reveal the cans of ice cold Dr. Pepper inside, Lucy flails. “Thank you,” she says almost reverently as she shuffles over to take a can and smiles at the calming sensation of her fingertips slipping over the condensation beading on the metal.

“Nico found it,” Glenn says, “but I found the cooler.”

Lucy smiles wider before she takes a long drink of the soda and moans at its dark, biting sweetness. Glenn laughs and leaves the cooler on the floor as he walks away. Lucy glances down at the box of seed packets that peeks out from under her bed.

 _Happy birthday to me_ , she thinks.

* * *

 _Friday, 13 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 61._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Healy Building._

* * *

It’s Andrea’s idea to take a group of people on a supply run instead of just one person running around the dead city with a backpack while the other drives the getaway car. Glenn is reluctant even as other members of the group volunteer: Kate, T-Dog, Morales, Jacqui, Merle, and finally Andrea herself. None of the cars they have comfortably seat seven people, so Merle boosts a van off the highway and they drive to downtown Atlanta.

Gunfire ricochets out in the street as Glenn is going over the plan for the run with the other members of the group. When the guy who popped off a few rounds and made the zombies swarm crawls into a tank, he tunes his walkie-talkie to the frequency the army was using before they stopped broadcasting the message to take refuge at Fort Benning on the slim chance he gets through.

“Hey you,” Glenn says. “Dumbass.”

When he pauses, a gasp echoes through the static. Dumbass or not, he’s just trying to stay alive.

“Yeah, you in the tank,” Glenn deadpans. “Cozy in there?”


	5. Dead City Radio and the New Gods of Supertown

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot believe the plot holes in this episode. Firstly: T-Dog and Morales are wearing body armor that we never see again on the show, even though it would’ve been incredibly useful to have around. Secondly: it’s established that zombies can’t get through a barricade the Vatos gang put in the street, but they can apparently use rocks to break windows. I call shenanigans. Thirdly: nobody but Rick hears the helicopter even though it would’ve been too loud for them not to hear it too. I call shenanigans again. Fourthly: I’m going to retcon everything about Andrea not knowing how to use her own fucking gun because that reeked of sexist bullshit and that’s not my jam.

**A zombie film is not fun without a bunch of stupid people running around and observing how they fail to handle the situation.**

George A. Romero

* * *

 _Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. I**  
_Days Gone Bye_  
**Chapter 5**  
Dead City Radio and the New Gods of Supertown

* * *

 _Friday, 13 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 61._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Healy Building._

* * *

“What’s goin’ on?” Merle asks.

Glenn doesn’t answer him because he’s too busy peering down at the dogpile of zombies in the intersection below fighting over the meat of a dead horse. Until now he didn’t know horses could scream, and that’s a sound he won’t be able to forget anytime soon. “Hey,” he says after a few minutes of silence, “are you alive in there?”

“Hello?” the voice on the other end of the frequency blurts out shakily. “Hello?”

Glenn heaves a sigh of relief. “There you are,” he says. “You had me wondering.”

“Where are you?” the other man wants to know. “Outside? Can you see me right now?”

“Yeah,” Glenn says. “I can see you. You’re surrounded by zombies. That’s the bad news.”

“There’s good news?” the other man asks.

“No,” Glenn mutters.

Kate hands him a piece of notebook paper with _What’s going on?_ written in bright purple ink on the first line. Glenn spreads the paper out on top of the parapet and writes, _I’m trying to help him get out of this alive. I want you guys to meet us on the ground level so we can ask him what the hell he was doing riding into the city on a horse like a freaking cowboy_.

“Listen,” the other man says, “whoever you are, I don’t mind telling you I’m a little concerned in here.”

Glenn shakes his head slowly and fidgets with the brim of his baseball cap. “Oh man,” he says. “You should see it from over here. You’d be having a major freak-out.”

“Got any advice for me?” the other man asks.

Glenn heaves another sigh. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’d say make a run for it.”

“That’s it?” the other man exhales an incredulous sound, “‘make a run for it’?”

“My way’s not as dumb as it sounds,” Glenn huffs. _Dumbass_ , he thinks. “You’ve got eyes on the outside here. There’s one zombie still up on the tank, but the others have climbed down and joined the feeding frenzy where your horse went down. You with me so far?”

“Yeah,” the other man says, “so far.”

“Okay,” Glenn says, trying to steady his voice to sound more confident than he feels at the moment, “the street on the other side of the tank is less crowded. If you move now while they’re distracted, you stand a chance. Got ammo?”

“Yeah,” the other man tells him, “in that duffle bag I dropped out there, and guns. Can I get to it?”

Glenn shakes his head before he remembers the other man can’t see what he’s doing. “Forget the bag, okay?” he says. “It’s not an option. What do you have on you?”

“Hang on,” the other man says. “I’ve got a Beretta with one clip. Fifteen rounds.”

Glenn nods again, more to himself than the dumbass. “Make ’em count,” he says. “Jump off the right side of the tank and keep going in that direction. There’s an alley up the street, maybe fifty yards. Be there.”

* * *

Kate sighs and taps her earpiece as soon as Glenn leaves the building to rescue the idiot in the tank. “Anybody there?” she asks.

“I’m here,” Lucy says. “I just saw Lori sneak off into the woods to have sex with Shane and she was being all stealthy about it, like we don’t know they’ve been banging like a screen door in a hurricane for weeks. What’s up?”

“Some guy rode up out of nowhere and shots were fired,” Kate tells her. “There’s a massive horde of zombies in the street. I doubt we’re all going to make it back to camp.”

“Unacceptable,” Lucy retorts and taps her earpiece to mute it before she shuffles out of her trailer and yells, “Nico!”

Nico stops trying to get the old radio to work and shouts back, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s contingency plan o’clock!” Lucy tells her.

Nico wipes at the sweat on her forehead with the back of her hand and sighs. “I’ll find Cath,” she says.

“I’ll find the weapons of glass destruction,” Lucy says.

Nico snorts at the pun and smiles even though she knows Lucy can’t see it from so far away. “Okay,” she says. “Nico out.”

* * *

 _Friday, 13 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 61._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bradbury’s Boutique._

* * *

Rick fires fourteen of his fifteen rounds into the horde of zombies shambling through the streets before he introduces himself to Glenn and shakes his hand. It goes pretty smoothly, all things considered, but meeting the others? Not so much.

Morales and T-Dog, the guys in body armor who beat in the skulls of two zombies in the alley with blunt instruments, remove their helmets and stuff their chest protectors into their backpacks as soon as they’re inside. It’s hot as hell, and they’re sweating hard. Jacqui scrutinizes him, but says nothing. Andrea, though, doesn’t waste any time shoving him against a pile of wooden pallets and pointing a gun at his head.

“You son of a bitch,” she snarls. “We ought to kill you.”

“Just chill out, Andrea,” Morales huffs, “back off.”

“Come on,” Jacqui tells her softly. “Ease up.”

“Ease up?” Andrea makes a high-pitched incredulous noise. “You’re kidding me, right?” she scoffs and shakes her head slowly. “We’re dead because of this stupid asshole.”

“Andrea, I said back the hell off.” Morales heaves a sigh. “Or just pull the trigger.”

After she lowers her gun and clicks the safety back on, Andrea keeps shaking her head as tears sting hotly at the corners of her eyes. “We’re dead,” she says. “All of us. Because of you.”

“I don’t understand,” Rick says.

“Look.” Morales pulls him down the hallway from the loading area through the backdoor of a clothing boutique. “We came into the city to scavenge supplies. You know what the key to scavenging is?”

“That would be surviving,” Kate deadpans.

Morales nods. “You know the key to surviving?” he says. “Sneaking in and out. Tiptoeing. Not shooting up the streets like it’s the O. K. Corral.”

“Every zombie for miles around heard you popping off rounds,” T-Dog explains.

Andrea looks at the horde of zombies snarling and clawing at the windows in the front of the store, pale eyes wide and mouth gaping open in fear. “You just rang the dinner bell,” she says.

“What the hell were you even doing out there?” Kate wants to know.

“Trying to flag the helicopter,” Rick tells her.

T-Dog snorts. “Man, that’s crap,” he says, “ain’t no damn helicopter.”

“You were chasing a hallucination,” Jacqui says, not unkindly. “Imagining things. It happens.”

Rick shakes his head so fast he almost discombobulates himself. “I saw it,” he insists.

“Okay,” Kate retorts. “So why didn’t we hear it?”

Morales heaves his umpteenth sigh. “Kate, can you contact the others?” he asks.

“What others?” Rick asks, “the refugee center?”

Jacqui snorts. “Yeah,” she says, “the refugee center. They’ve got biscuits waiting in the oven for us.”

“It’s okay,” Kate says. “Lucy has a contingency plan.”

Rick frowns at her. “Wait,” he says, “who’s Lucy?”

“Lucy’s a librarian,” Glenn informs him, “she overthinks everything, but I’ve never met anyone who’s as smart as she is. All we have to do is stay alive long enough for her to get us out of here.”

There’s a palpable change in the air as everyone in the group collectively sighs with relief. It’s short-lived, though, because the sound of gunfire ricochets from above them a few seconds later.

“Oh, no…” Andrea groans, “was that Dixon?”

* * *

 _Friday, 13 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 61._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Healy Building._

* * *

Rick follows the others upstairs to the roof, where a tall man in jeans and a leather vest is standing on the edge of the parapet with a hunting rifle. Kate surreptitiously clicks the safety off before she puts her finger next to the trigger, just in case.

“Hey, Dixon!” Morales shouts, “are you crazy?”

Merle puts the rifle on his shoulder and turns to face them with a cocky grin on his face. “Hey,” he says before he jumps down and lands in a crouch on the rooftop. “Y’all ought to be more polite to a man with a gun. Only common sense.”

“Man, you’re wasting bullets we ain’t even got,” T-Dog points out, “and you’re bringing even more of them down on our asses. Man, just chill.”

Merle snorts. “Bad enough I’ve got this taco-bender on my ass all day,” he says, “now I’m gonna take orders from you? I don’t think so, bro. That’ll be the day.”

“‘That’ll be the day’?” T-Dog snaps back, “you got something you wanna tell me?”

“Hey,” Morales interjects, “T-Dog, just leave it. Merle, just relax, okay? We’ve got enough trouble.”

Rick glances at Glenn, who shakes his head. After the redneck hurls a racial slur at him, T-Dog gets one punch in before Merle starts beating the crap out of him. Morales tries to get Merle to stop and gets elbowed in the stomach; Rick tries to intervene and gets punched in the face. Merle knocks T-Dog face first into a metal pipe and kneels over him to punch him in the face over and over. Andrea draws her gun and clicks the safety off as Kate moves to press the barrel of her pistol against the back of his thick head.

“Okay,” she says, “that’s enough.”

Merle reaches behind his back to draw the handgun under his vest as Jacqui and Glenn drag T-Dog out from under him. Andrea steps into his line of sight and lets him see her putting her finger on the trigger.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she says.

Rick snatches the rifle and hits Merle in the mouth with it before he handcuffs one of his hands to one of the rustier pipes.

“Hey,” Merle yelps with blood dripping from one corner of his mouth as Rick grabs the lapels of his vest and lifts him off the ground, “who the hell are you, man?”

“Officer Friendly,” Rick snarks back. “Look here, Merle. Things are different now. There’s only dark meat and white meat. There’s us and the dead. We survive this by pulling together, not apart.”

“Uh,” Merle groans, “screw you, man.”

Rick snorts. “I can see you make a habit of missing the point,” he says.

“Yeah?” Merle says. “Well, screw you twice.”

Rick presses the nozzle of the handgun that Merle had on him against his temple. “You ought to be more polite to a man with a gun,” he quips. “Only common sense.”

“You wouldn’t,” Merle scoffs. “You’re a cop.”

“All I am anymore is a man looking for his wife and son,” Rick informs him in a quiet, deadly voice. “Anybody who gets in the way of that is gonna lose. I’ll give you a moment to think about that.”

Rick finds a vial of pulverized crystal meth in the pocket of his vest and throws it away while Merle yells at him, an exercise in futility. Jacqui uses an alcohol swab to clean the cuts on T-Dog’s face while he winces through the pain. Andrea tries to unclench the tension in her shoulders even as Merle hits on her in a transparent attempt to manipulate her into setting him free.

Kate sighs and taps her earpiece again. “Merle got high and shot at the zombies in the street near where he parked our getaway car,” she tells Lucy, “before he beat the crap out of T-Dog. Please tell me the plan is working.”

Rick stops talking to Morales and taps her on the shoulder. “May I?” he asks.

Kate shrugs and wipes the earpiece on the bottom of her shirt before she hands it over.

“Hello,” Rick says. “I take it this is Lucy.”

“Yup,” Lucy pops the _p_ sound, “and you’re the Man with No Name throwback who’s been doing his best to get my oldest friend killed by dead things.”

“I have a name,” he says, “it’s Rick.”

“Hi, Rick,” Lucy deadpans as glass shatters into static feedback over the radio and a car alarm blares in the distance. “Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Rick says. “Look…” he glances at Kate, who’s side-eyeing Merle, “…I got these people into this mess. I need your help getting all of us out of it.”

“Okay,” Lucy says. “There’s just one problem. Merle boosted a van for the supply run to drive everyone into the city. I’m guessing that’s a lost cause, since it’s on a street full of zombies. So,” she says, “your mission—that you have no choice but to accept if you want to survive—is getting your hands on a new method of transportation. Got it?”

“Got it.” Rick wipes the earpiece on the front of his uniform shirt, hands it back to Kate, and turns to look at Glenn. “We need to find a way out,” he says.


	6. Hideous Exhibitions of a Dedicated Gore Whore

**When you can help people stay alive, you help them. We’re all we’ve got.**

Mira Grant, _Feed_

* * *

 _Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. I**  
_Days Gone Bye_  
**Chapter 6**  
Hideous Exhibitions of a Dedicated Gore Whore

* * *

 _Friday, 13 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 61._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Healy Building._

* * *

Kate tilts her head to one side and puts her earpiece back in. Andrea tucks her gun into the front of her pants and shifts awkwardly before she settles into the aggressively, stereotypically masculine stance. It’s the end of the world and she’s still trying to teach herself the lesson that being a trans woman doesn’t mean she can’t do the things that cis men traditionally do.

Rick shakes his head as a car alarm blares from a few blocks away. “These streets ain’t safe,” he mutters.

Morales snorts. “Now there’s an understatement.”

“What about underneath the streets?” Kate says. “If that intersection is blocked, we could just go under the zombies and past the barricade. Maybe to that construction site,” she points down the street to a fenced-in area, “where the U-Hauls are.”

Morales nods, succinctly. It’s as good a plan as any. “Hey, Glenn,” he says. “Check the alley. You see any manhole covers?”

Glenn sprints around the edge of the roof and shakes his head. “No,” he says, “must be out on the street where the zombies are.”

“Maybe not,” Jacqui tells him. “Old buildings like this, built in the ’20s, big structures often had drainage tunnels into the sewers in case of flooding down in the subbasements.”

“How do you know that?” Glenn asks.

“It’s my job…” Jacqui says in her quiet Southern drawl before she corrects herself, “…was. I worked in the city zoning office.”

* * *

T-Dog stays on the roof to try and use a C. B. to contact the others back at the quarry and keep an eye on Merle, who’s still handcuffed to the rusty pipeline, while the rest of the group ignores every horror movie ever and goes down into the subbasement. It’s dark, an eerie lack of light that makes any slim illumination seem ominous instead of comforting because anything could be lurking in the shadows. There’s a line of shuttered windows with streams of dull sunshine peeking in through the cracks.

Morales eyes the drainage tunnel dubiously. “This is it?” he says, “are you sure?”

Glenn nods, a quick bob of his head. “I really scoped this place out the other times I was here,” he explains. “It’s the only thing in the building that goes down, but I’ve never gone down there. Who’d want to, right?” he exhales a nervous huff of laughter before he notices the expectant looks everyone else is giving him. “Oh,” he mutters under his breath. “Great.”

“We’ll be right behind you,” Andrea says.

“No, you won’t.” Glenn slashes one hand through the stale air in a nonverbal retort. “Not you.”

Andrea leans on the metal railing that surrounds the entrance to the tunnel. “Why not me?” she says accusatorially. “You think I can’t?”

Glenn shakes his head. “I wasn’t…” he mumbles.

“Speak your mind,” Rick tells him.

Glenn exhales a frustrated noise. “Look,” he says. “Until now I always came here by myself. In and out. Grab a few things. No problem, but the first time I bring a group everything goes to hell. No offense,” he splays his fingers in mock surrender before he looks at Rick, “if you want me to go down this gnarly hole, fine, but only if we do it my way. It’s tight down there, and if I run into something and I have to get out quick, I don’t want you all jammed up behind me getting me killed. I’ll take one person. Not you, either,” he tells Rick as the former sheriff tries to step up, “you’ve got Merle’s gun and I’ve seen you shoot. I’d feel better if you were out in that store watching those doors, covering our asses. Kate, Andrea, you’ve got the other guns, so you should go with him. Morales, you be my wingman. Jacqui stays here and if something happens, she can yell down to us and get us back up here in a hurry.”

Jacqui nods and adjusts her grip on her flashlight. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Rick says, “everybody knows their jobs.”

Glenn exhales with enough force to flap his lips before he squares his shoulders and descends into darkness.

* * *

 _Friday, 13 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 61._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bradbury’s Boutique._

* * *

Kate doesn’t waste any time filling a bag with new clothes—they can do laundry at the quarry, but it’s a waste to leave perfectly good clothing in a boutique where no one will ever shop again. Rick watches her with a bemused expression before he turns back to look at the zombies still clawing at the storefront windows.

“Sorry for the gun in your face,” Andrea says.

“People do things when they’re afraid,” Rick observes, implicitly accepting her apology.

Andrea shrugs. “Not that it was entirely unjustified,” she points out, “you did get us into this.”

“Well,” says Rick, “if I get us out, would that make up for it?”

Andrea smiles at him. “No,” she says, “but it’d be a start.”

Rick arches his eyebrows as she stops in front of the jewelry counter. “See something you like?” he asks.

Andrea smiles wider at the mermaid pendant on a thin gold chain. “Not me,” she says, “but I know someone who would. Amy, my sister. She just finished med school, but she’s still such a kid in some ways. Unicorns. Dragons. She’s into all that stuff, but mermaids…they rule. She loves mermaids.”

Rick cocks his head and looks at her over his shoulder. “Why not take it?” he asks.

“There’s a cop staring at me,” Andrea says, her smile fading as she looks up at him. “Would it be considered looting?” she asks.

Rick smiles back and shakes his head slowly. “I don’t think those rules apply anymore,” he says, “do you?”

Andrea secrets the necklace away in the back pocket of her jeans as the glass in the outer set of doors shatters. Kate slings her bag onto her shoulder and draws her gun. Glenn, Morales, and Jacqui come running as the walking corpses shamble to inner set of doors. It’s only a matter of time before they get through.

“What’d you find down there?” Rick asks without taking his eyes off the zombie horde.

“Not a way out,” Morales says.

“Well, we need to find a way,” Rick tells him, “and soon.”

* * *

 _Friday, 13 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 61._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Healy Building._

* * *

There are more car alarms shrieking in the distance, the cacophony more audible from the roof of the building. It’s drawing away a huge chunk of the zombies and luring them back down the street. Kate must’ve told her friends about the vans at the construction site, because the zombies are moving in the opposite direction—they’re just not moving fast enough, not with cracks in the door of the boutique.

“They’re drawn to sound,” Rick murmurs.

Glenn nods. “They hear a sound,” he says. “They come.”

“What else?” Rick wants to know.

“They see you, smell you,” Morales says, “and if they catch you, they eat you.”

Which explains why the ones close enough to catch a whiff of them aren’t leaving to investigate the sounds of the car alarms. “They can tell us by smell?” Rick asks.

“Yeah,” Glenn says, “can’t you?”

“They smell dead,” Andrea points out, “we don’t. It’s pretty distinct.”

Rick swallows hard as something gruesome occurs to him. “I think I might have an idea,” he says.

* * *

“If bad ideas were an Olympic event,” Glenn tells him once they’re back downstairs in the loading area behind the boutique, “this would take the gold.”

Morales frowns. “Glenn’s right,” he says as Rick pulls on a pair of blue plastic gloves. “Just stop, okay? Take some time to think this through.”

“How much time?” Rick snaps back. “They already got through one set of doors.”

“That glass isn’t going to hold forever,” Kate points out.

Morales grits his teeth around a frustrated noise and takes the pair of gloves Rick offers to him with a disgruntled, disgusted look on his face. It only gets worse once they drag a dead body in from the alley. Kate grimaces down at the body as Rick crouches and pulls his wallet out of his pocket.

“Wayne Dunlap,” he says. “Georgia license, born in 1979. He had twenty-eight dollars in his wallet when he died, and a picture of a pretty girl. ‘With love, from Rachel.’ He used to be like us, worrying about bills, or the Super Bowl…” he hands the wallet to Glenn and stares down at the dead man silently for a few seconds before he solemnly says, “if I ever find my family, I’m gonna tell them about Wayne.”

Glenn tries to swallow the nausea brewing in his stomach like a storm as Rick rises to his feet. “One more thing,” he says. “He was an organ donor.”

Kate takes a step backward as Rick swings an axe at the dead man’s chest. No way is she getting blood and guts on her favorite pair of jeans.

* * *

 _Friday, 13 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 61._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

Andrea gives her gun to Glenn once he and the former sheriff are coated in gore, just in case. Rick hands over the key to the handcuffs he used to chain the redneck to the roof. T-Dog gets through to the others while Rick and Glenn are viscerally shuffling through the horde of zombies in the street. Shane decides they’re a lost cause once the connection withers and dies.

“No way,” he says. “We do not go after them. We do not risk the rest of the group, y’all know that.”

“So we’re just going to leave her there?” Amy says incredulously.

“Look,” Shane mutters, “I know that this is not easy—”

“She volunteered to go to help the rest of us,” Amy snaps back.

“I know,” Shane says in what he hopes is a soothing voice, “and she knew the risks, right? See, if she’s trapped, she’s gone. So we just have to deal with that. There’s nothing more we can do.”

“She’s my sister, you son of a bitch,” Amy snarls and bites down around the words, “and if you won’t do something, I know Lucy will.”

Shane narrows his eyes at Amy as she walks away. Come to think of it, he hasn’t seen Lucy or her friends around for hours. Not since they helped make lunch for everyone and Daryl went off into the woods to track down a deer he spotted that morning while he was checking his snares. “Wait,” he says, “where are they?”

Lori frowns. “Who?”

“Lucy, Cath, Nico,” Shane says, “where the hell are they?”

* * *

 _Friday, 13 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 61._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Healy Building._

* * *

There’s a military-grade barricade that’s blocking one side of the four-way intersection at Forsyth and Walton, where the tank operator stopped and died in the middle of evacuating the Fairlie-Poplar district of downtown Atlanta. It’s keeping the zombie horde trapped on the street in front of the boutique. Thunder fizzes in the sky overhead, the clouds bursting as Rick and Glenn make run for it and Nico parks on the other side of the building at the mouth of the alley. Lucy nuzzles Romy’s wet puppy nose and hands her corgi to Cath before she hops out of the passenger seat and swings her machete at a zombie’s skull with the hand she isn’t using to grip her cane.

 _I need to thank Daryl again for this_ , she thinks as she flicks the blood on the blade onto the pavement, _best belated birthday present ever_.

“Clear,” she tells her friends as “Another One Bites the Dust” booms out of a stereo that Nico connected to a car battery a few blocks away.

Nico frowns as the song loops back to the beginning. “I can’t believe you found a way to work a pun into our extraction plan,” she says.

Lucy shrugs and shifts her weight onto her cane as she pivots to stab an approaching zombie in the face. “I am what I am,” she deadpans.

Cath plunges one of her knitting needles into the eye of another zombie while it gnaws futilely on her arm through the sleeve of her jacket. There are strips of brightly colored duct tape with Disney princesses on them stuck to the fabric, impossible for a bicuspid to bite through on the first try. Romy pokes her head out of the open backpack Cath is wearing and boofs happily as she taps her earpiece.

“Hey,” she says, “we’re outside in the alley. What’s going on?”

“Rick is coming to the rollup doors facing the street to get everyone,” Kate informs her as she reaches the bottom of the stairs, “but I can meet you guys in the alley.”

Glenn speeds past the jeep in a cherry red Mustang with the alarm shrieking indignantly, luring what’s left of the horde down the street. T-Dog trips and drops the handcuff key down the drain before he leaves Merle on the roof and chains the door shut on his way out. Kate jumps into the backseat next to Cath as Rick drives off with everyone else in the U-Haul.

Lucy glances at Kate in the rearview mirror and swallows thickly. “Don’t ever scare me like that again,” she whispers shakily.

Kate grins at her. “I can’t promise that because we’re basically living in a horror movie,” she says, “but I can promise that next time I won’t go without you.”

Lucy sighs as the persistent tension in her shoulders tries to put down roots. _Don’t make promises you can’t keep_ , she thinks.

I-75 is packed with abandoned cars whose owners never made it out of the city to one side and a stretch of open road on the other. Nico eases off the gas once they’re next to the U-Haul so Lucy can wave to Rick before she floors it and leaves the former sheriff in the dust.


	7. Return of the Phantom Stranger

**Knowing someone isn’t coming back**  
**doesn’t mean you ever stop waiting**.

Toby Barlow, _Sharp Teeth_

* * *

 _Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. I**  
_Days Gone Bye_  
**Chapter 7**  
Return of the Phantom Stranger

* * *

 _Friday, 13 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 61._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

Glenn arrives back at camp first, the alarm screeching as he emerges from the Mustang to find everybody talking at once. Amy frantically shouts over the others until he tells her that Andrea is fine before he clarifies that everybody made it out of the city alive besides Merle. Nico parks by T-Dog’s church van as the U-Haul stops on the gravel road behind them.

Amy chokes back tears before she runs to Andrea and throws her arms around her. Miranda, Morales’ wife, is all smiles. Dale grins and hugs the other man, clapping him on the back so everyone knows it’s a manly hug. Sophia waves to Lucy shyly before Ed glares at her and she flinches.

 _Okay_ , Lucy thinks, _someone needs to feed him to a zombie. I vote me_.

“How’d y’all get outta there, anyway?” Shane asks.

“Lucy got us out,” Glenn informs him, “but we couldn’t have done it without the new guy’s help.”

“What new guy?” Shane wants to know.

“Crazy vato who just got into town.” Morales exhales a bright, elated puff of laughter. “Hey, helicopter boy! Come say hello.”

Shane’s eyes go wide and he staggers at the sight of the thin man in the sheriff’s uniform. Carl gapes, his mouth wobbling like he’s trying not to cry as a glimmer of hope shatters Lori’s stricken expression.

 _Wait_ , Lucy thinks, _wasn’t Lori’s dead husband named Rick?_

Rick falls to his knees and scoops his long-lost son into his arms. When he walks over to where Lori is standing he wraps one arm around her and curls his fingers into her tangled brown hair as she sniffles and buries her face in his neck.

Lucy bites her lip and looks away. It’s a fucking miracle—one that should warm her heart and make her feel happy for them—but she feels numb. There’s no way for her to know whether her family is alive or dead, no way to get closure one way or another for what she’s lost. It’s not fair, but life never has been. There’s no reason the zombie apocalypse would change that.

* * *

Rick shares the story of the past two days later that night when everyone is sitting around the campfire, of waking up alone in a hospital that had been overrun by zombies with a parking lot full of corpses shrouded in pale sheets and of the constant fear they’ve all been living with for almost two months. While the fear of being eaten alive by ravenous hordes of the walking dead is more rational than her anxiety, Lucy doesn’t feel any more fearful than she always did before the outbreak. If anything, learning to live with fear pre-apocalypse has made her adaptable in a way that neurotypical people aren’t.

Storytime ends as the smaller campfire that Ed, Carol, and Sophia are clustered around roars dangerously high. Shane puts their fire out, but fans the flames of something worse.

“Have you given any thought to Daryl Dixon?” Dale asks. “I know he won’t be happy to hear his brother was left behind.”

“I’ll tell him,” says T-Dog. “I dropped the key. It’s on me.”

“I cuffed him,” Rick points out, “that makes it mine.”

Glenn heaves a sigh. “Guys,” he says. “It’s not a competition. I don’t mean to bring race into this, but it might sound better coming from a white guy.”

“I did what I did,” T-Dog insists, “hell if I’m gonna hide from it.”

“We could lie,” Amy suggests.

“Or tell the truth,” Andrea says. “Merle was out of control. Something had to be done or he would have gotten us killed,” she turns to look at Lori before she adds, “what your husband did was necessary, and if Merle got left behind, it is nobody’s fault but Merle’s.”

Dale frowns. “So that’s what we tell Daryl?” he says incredulously. “I don’t see a rational discussion to be had from that, do you?” he shakes his head. “Word to the wise, we’re gonna have our hands full when he gets back from his hunt.”

Andrea looks down at her bent knees as Rick and Shane exchange glances across the campfire, a nonverbal conversation the likes of which only partners can have.

“I was scared and I ran,” T-Dog says gravely. “I’m not ashamed of it.”

“We were all scared,” Andrea retorts. “We all ran. What’s your point?”

“I stopped long enough to chain that door,” T-Dog explains. “Staircase is narrow. Maybe half a dozen zombies can squeeze against it at any one time. Not enough to break through that. Not that chain. Not that padlock,” he swallows hard, “my point…Dixon’s alive. He’s still up there, handcuffed on that roof, and that’s on us.”

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips. “I’ll tell Daryl,” she says, “he’s my friend. I’ll tell him what happened,” she adjusts her glasses and slants her gaze to Rick, “and then I’ll offer to help him go back for Merle. Maybe that way he won’t try to put an arrow through your eye.”

Rick watches Lucy muffle a yawn in one palm as she shuffles back to her trailer. “I don’t think she likes me,” he says.

Cath snorts. “No,” she says, “that was just her spectacularly abrasive way of trying to help.”

“Lucy speaks her mind,” Nico informs him with a smile full of teeth, “and she’s not exactly shy about how blunt she is when she does. If she didn’t like you, she would have just told you that.”

Rick smiles back and nods, a slow but sure descent of his chin. “Good to know,” he says.

* * *

 _Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

It rains that night in scattered bursts of downpour that subside by morning. Shane drives down the rocky road to the quarry at sunrise and collects water for everyone while the women do the laundry that has accumulated over the past month. Rick sleeps in until noon and leaves his tent to find Glenn watching mournfully as Nico, Morales, Jim, and Dale strip the Mustang for parts. Kate and Cath are hanging their laundry out to dry on a line strung in the space between the trailer and a nearby tree. It’s so tranquil he actually forgets the world is full of flesh-eating monsters, until he hears Carl screaming from somewhere at the edge of the woods.

After everyone within earshot comes running, the mothers check the children for bites and scratches while anyone who brought a weapon goes further into the woods to find the zombie that scared them. Sophia is carrying Romy in her arms instead of holding onto her leash. Carl drops the machete that Lucy gave him to use to protect the other kids.

Shane, Rick, Glenn, Morales, Jim, and Dale run into a small clearing to find the carcass of a doe with gaping hole in her throat and Lucy standing with a zombie facedown in the dirt, clawing at the ground as she keeps her boot on the back of its neck. There are a pair of .38 Special revolvers holstered on her belt, undrawn. It’s obvious that she didn’t want to waste any bullets if she didn’t have to.

“Thank you,” Rick says, “for protecting my son.”

Lucy bites her lip and hums a nonverbal _You’re welcome_. “Sophia likes walking Romy,” she explains, “and Carl likes Sophia.”

Rick heaves a sigh of relief. “Well,” he says, “at least they’re using the buddy system.”

Shane eyes the dead hands gnarling in the dirt. “What about you?” he says.

“I’m not infected, if that’s what you’re asking,” Lucy tells him.

Shane nods, curtly. Lucy steps back toward the trees and shifts her weight onto her cane as they start beating the crap out of the zombie. Dale chops its head off with a swing of his axe and wheezes at the stench of raw meat and putrid decay. Shane aims his rifle at the trees at the sound of someone moving in the woods.

It’s Daryl, who only has eyes for Lucy until he notices the blood from the dearly departed doe oozing into the dirt. “Son of a bitch,” he shouts, “that’s my deer! Look at it, all gnawed on by this filthy, disease-bearing, motherless,” he says as he kicks the headless zombie over and over to punctuate each word, “poxy bastard!”

Dale sighs. “Calm down, son,” he says, “that’s not helping.”

“What do you know about it, old man?” Daryl snarls. “Why don’t you take that stupid hat and go back to _On Golden Pond_?”

Dale’s eyes go wide as the other man gets in his face and he looks away first, an unconscious submissive move from prey to predator. Lucy shuffles over to Daryl and puts a tentative hand on his bare shoulder. There’s sweat on his skin and several days’ worth of grease in his hair, but somehow he doesn’t stink. It’s a mystery, one that she doesn’t have the spoons—the energy—to solve this afternoon. “Daryl,” she says.

When she says his name, that’s all it takes to make him go from being angrily frustrated to another kind of frustration altogether. Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and backs off. Lucy smiles and gently squeezes his shoulder before she shuffles away and takes her soft hand with her. Daryl grunts and narrows his eyes at the deer while he yanks his arrows out of its hindquarters. “I’ve been tracking this deer for miles,” he mutters. “I was gonna drag it back to camp. Cook us up some venison. What do you think,” he glances at Shane and points to the ripped-out throat, “do you think we can just cut around this chewed up part right here?”

Shane frowns and shakes his head. “I would not risk that,” he says.

“That’s a damn shame,” Daryl says. “I got some squirrels,” he tugs at the rope looped over his shoulder to draw their attention to his game, “’bout a dozen or so. That’ll have to do.”

Lucy shuffles around the deer and he stops her with a hand on her upper arm once he notices something is missing, specifically the empty sheath attached to the studded belt around her waist. Daryl forces himself to keep his grip loose and clears his throat instead of pulling her flush against him like he wants to.

“Hey,” he says. “What happened to the machete I gave you?”

“Carl has it,” Lucy informs him. “I told him to protect Sophia, Eliza, and Louis with it while I waited for backup. I have my guns. I just didn’t want to use them if I didn’t have to.”

Daryl nods. “Sorry I didn’t get here sooner,” he says. “I could’ve backed ya’ up myself.”

Lucy squeezes his fingers and looks down as the disembodied zombie head opens its eyes and gnashes its teeth. “Okay,” she says, “that’s just wrong.”

“Ugh!” Amy groans at the horrible sight and turns away. Andrea puts an arm around her sister and tries to comfort her as they walk back to the campsite.

Daryl exhales a frustrated noise and reluctantly lets go of Lucy. “C’mon, people. What the hell?” he shakes his head before he aims his crossbow at the zombie, puts a bolt through one of its eyes, and pulls the arrow out again once it stops moving. “It’s gotta be the brain,” he adds as he leaves the carcass in the dirt and makes his way out of the woods, “don’t y’all know nothin’?”

Lucy shuffles over to the RV where the rest of the group is waiting under the canopy. Lori gives her a dirty look as Carl gives the machete back and Lucy slips it into its sheath.

“I don’t want you giving my son weapons,” she hisses, “he’s just a boy.”

Lucy shrugs, one shoulder hunching towards her earlobe. “Okay,” she says, “but don’t blame me if he dies because you don’t want him to learn how to protect himself without you or his father looking over his shoulder.”

* * *

Rick breaks the news about what happened in Atlanta to Daryl with a bloodstain on the front of his white t-shirt, a metaphorical bleeding heart. “Merle was a danger to us all,” he tells him calmly, “so I handcuffed him on a roof, hooked him to a piece of metal. He’s still there.”

Daryl grits his teeth and wipes the sweat and tears out of his eyes. “Hold on,” he says, “lemme process this…you’re sayin’ you handcuffed my brother to a roof, and you left him there?”

Rick slumps his shoulders and looks away. “Yeah,” he says.

Daryl tosses the dead squirrels at Rick and gets knocked down by Shane before he can even throw a punch. T-Dog drops the firewood he was carrying and goes to intervene, but stops as soon as Daryl unsheathes his knife.

Lucy shuffles over and steps in front of Daryl to stop him from lunging at Rick, the knife slashing through dead air as she holds up one hand in a nonverbal _Stop_. “Okay,” she says, “that’s enough. Daryl, stabbing the new guy isn’t going to help Merle or make you feel better. Shane,” she gives him a warning look, “back off.”

Daryl blinks through his tears and makes a disgruntled noise before he snaps his knife into its sheath. Shane raises his hands in mock surrender and steps back, rubbing his head with both hands to unclench his fists. Daryl is seething with anger—chest heaving, eyes narrowed to slits, nostrils flaring—but Lucy calms him down.

“I’d like to have a calm discussion on this topic,” Rick says, “do you think we can manage that?”

Daryl nods, brusquely. “Yeah,” he mutters.

“What I did was not on a whim,” Rick explains, “your brother does not work and play well with others.”

“But it’s not Rick’s fault,” T-Dog interjects. “I had the key. I dropped it.”

Daryl frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing. “You couldn’t pick it up?” he asks.

“Well,” T-Dog says, “I dropped it in a drain.”

Daryl chokes back tears and makes a wounded noise that starts low in his throat and works its way out of his mouth. “If that’s supposed to make me feel better,” he snaps, “it don’t.”

“Maybe this will,” T-Dog says. “I chained the door to the roof with a padlock so the zombies couldn’t get at him.”

“Yeah,” Rick adds, “that’s gotta count for something.”

Daryl sniffles and shakes his head. “Hell with all y’all,” he snarls. “Just tell me where he is so I can go get ’im.”

“He’ll show you,” Lori cuts in sharply, “ain’t that right?”

Rick nods. “I’m going back,” he says.

 _Famous last words_ , Lucy thinks.


	8. Black Sunshine

**Do not go back for the death wish. Do not go back.**

Caitlyn Siehl, “Handy Guide to Navigating the Fantasy”

* * *

 _Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. I**  
_Days Gone Bye_  
**Chapter 8**  
Black Sunshine

* * *

 _Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

Lucy knows what a happy marriage looks like because her adoptive parents—her real parents, her only parents—have one. Or they did, pre-apocalypse. Rick and Lori don’t seem happy in a way that can last. There’s still a glimmer of hope in the way she looks at him, but fear gnaws on such fragile things.

“Could you throw me a bone here, man?” Shane asks. “Could you just tell me why, why would you risk your life for a douchebag like Merle Dixon?”

“Hey,” Daryl says, “choose your words more carefully.”

“No, I did,” Shane retorts, “douchebag’s what I meant. Merle Dixon…” he shakes his head and exhales a derisive noise, “…the guy wouldn’t give you a glass of water if you were dyin’ of thirst.”

“What he would or wouldn’t do doesn’t interest me,” Rick tells him softly. “I can’t let a man die of thirst, _me_ ,” he holds his ground and his jaw slips into something more stubborn, “thirst and exposure. We left him like an animal caught in a trap and that’s no way for anything to die, let alone a human being.”

“So you and Lucy and Daryl,” Lori says dubiously, “that’s your big plan?”

Daryl blinks in surprise and stops meticulously cleaning his arrows with the cloth he keeps in his back pocket to sneak a glance at Lucy, who’s stimming by spinning the handle of her cane between her fingers haphazardly. Rick shakes his head slowly in answer to his wife’s question and turns to look at Glenn.

Glenn groans internally, externally, eternally. “Oh, come on…”

“You know the way,” Rick points out. “You’ve been there before, in and out, no problem. You said so yourself. It’s not fair of me to ask, I know that, but I’d feel a lot better with you along. I know Lori would, too.”

Shane arches his eyebrows incredulously. “Oh,” he huffs, “that’s just great. Now you’re gonna risk three men, huh?”

“No,” T-Dog shakes his head, “four.”

Daryl scoffs. “My day just gets better n’ better, don’t it?”

T-Dog sighs. “You see anybody else here stepping up to save your brother’s cracker ass?”

“Why you?” Daryl asks.

“You couldn’t even begin to understand,” T-Dog murmurs with a heavy weight to every word he says. “You don’t speak my language.”

“So that’s four,” Dale observes, “five including Lucy.”

Shane jabs an accusatory finger at his former partner. “You’re putting every single one of us at risk,” he says, “just know that, Rick. You saw that zombie. It was here. It was in camp. They’re moving out of the city. They come here, we’re gonna need every able body we’ve got.”

Lucy rolls her eyes at him. “I’m not able-bodied,” she deadpans. “I guess that means I can go wherever I want.”

Shane ignores her. “Rick,” he says and even though he doesn’t say _please_ out loud the desperation in his voice doesn’t go unspoken or unheard. “We need you here. We need you to protect camp.”

Rick shakes his head again. “It seems to me,” he says, “that what you really need most here are more guns.”

Glenn nods, a quick bob of his head. “Right,” he says, “the guns.”

“Wait.” Shane frowns. “What guns?”

“Six shotguns,” Rick clarifies. “Two high-powered rifles. Over a dozen handguns. I cleaned out the cage at the station before I left. I dropped the bag in Atlanta when I got swarmed. It’s just sitting there on the street, waiting to be picked up.”

There’s a change in the air at the mention of the small arsenal that Rick left behind in the city. Shane is perceptive enough to know he can’t win this argument, not with more guns thrown into the mix. Lori can try to convince Rick not to leave all she wants. It’s not going to change his mind. Lucy, meanwhile, shuffles back to her trailer to grab her backpack. If they’re going into the city, she might as well go prepared to snatch up any supplies she might find.

Kate corners her while she’s filling the bottom of her backpack with bullets. “I don’t think you should go alone,” she says. “I think Glenn and T-Dog are great, and I know you trust Daryl for whatever reason, but we barely know any of them and we don’t know the new guy at all.”

“I should go with her,” Cath says. “I haven’t seen the city since we went to the mall, and that was over a month ago. It’s my turn.”

“Okay,” Kate says, “Nico and I will be your extraction plan in case something goes wrong. Which it will,” she flicks her tongue against her teeth to elongate the _l_ sound into two syllables, “because our lives have become a horror movie.”

Lucy rolls her eyes and puts her earpiece in place before she shuffles over to the U-Haul and tucks her cane in the crook of her elbow. Rick and T-Dog are hustling a pair of bolt cutters out of Dale to break the chains keeping Merle from getting eaten by zombies. Daryl glares at them until Lucy grabs one of the ropes tied to the wall and he crouches to offer her a hand up. Lucy takes his hand in both of hers and lets him pull her into the back of the U-Haul.

“Thank you,” she tells him shyly, “but maybe you shouldn’t be lifting somebody who outweighs you like I do.”

Daryl snorts. “I can lift you no problem,” he tells her, “y’ain’t that heavy.”

Lucy shuffles over to the unoccupied space behind the passenger seat and folds herself into the makeshift corner with her cane on the floor against the wall. “I weigh almost two hundred pounds,” she mumbles.

Daryl shrugs. “I took down a three-hundred-pound buck once,” he says, “carried it outta the woods all by myself…” his chest swells with pride and he smiles crookedly at the memory of the hunt before he adds, “…bet I can pick ya’ up and carry ya’, too.”

Lucy flushes bright red from her cheeks to her collarbone and below, her blush hot enough to fog up her glasses around the edges. Cath shoots Daryl a shrewd look as she climbs into the back of the U-Haul through the front seat and sits down next to her best friend. Lucy is one of the most intelligent people she’s ever met, but she’s also totally oblivious when it comes to the attention of men; and some of that blissful ignorance is probably her subconscious way of protecting herself in the aftermath of everything she went through with her abusive exes.

Cath holds his gaze for a few seconds and glances at Lucy—who’s writing something in her listography notebook—before she looks back at him with a clench in her jaw and a vaguely threatening arch of her eyebrows.

Daryl narrows his eyes warily and frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing, because he knows what that look means.

 _Don’t hurt her_.

Daryl squares his shoulders and looks Cath in the eyes, unflinching.

 _Don’t worry. I won’t_.

* * *

 _Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_I-75 Horace E. Tate Freeway._

* * *

Lucy flinches at the loud noise that ensues when Daryl stomps on the horn impatiently and takes her earpiece out before she puts her earbuds in, using the music on her iPod to avoid sensory overload. Glenn hunches in the driver’s seat as Shane digs around in the bottom of his bag and gives Rick enough loose rounds to put the men in the U-Haul out of their misery if things go from bad to worse during the rescue mission. Rick climbs into the passenger seat and looks at Lucy in the rearview mirror.

“How do you charge that?” he asks.

“I have a solar-powered trailer,” Lucy tells him without bothering to take her earbuds out.

Rick looks out through the window at the wasteland passing them by. “Glenn says you’re the smartest person he’s ever met,” he says lightly.

Lucy takes one earbud out as she turns to look at Glenn over her shoulder. “You said that?” she asks. Glenn nods, sheepishly. Lucy smiles at him. “You’re as smart as I am,” she says, “we’re just not smart in the same way. Which is good,” she bites her lip and turns to look at Daryl, “because we’re going to need every kind of intelligence we can find to survive in this post-apocalyptic hellscape.”

Rick cocks his head thoughtfully. “So,” he says, “do either of you have any brothers or sisters?”

“Nope,” Cath says in a saccharinely cheerful voice she uses for customer service, “I’m an only child.”

“I had four,” Lucy murmurs, “a sister and three brothers.”

“Older or younger?” Rick wants to know.

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips. “Corny was three years younger than me,” she says. “Stella was twenty-two years older, Puck was twenty-five years older, and Morty was twenty-eight years older. Technically my older siblings were my half-siblings,” she twists the cord attached to her earbuds around her fingers, “but we never paid attention to the whole half-versus-full siblings thing because Stella and Corny and I were adopted. Morty and Puck were my mom’s only biological children and their dad left her for his secretary after they adopted Stella to try and fix their broken marriage,” she tugs her bottom lip between her teeth and gnaws before she adds, “they lived in San Francisco with their families—my sisters-in-law, my niece, my three nephews—and California was overrun before the power grid failed a month ago. None of them survived.”

Daryl nods sharply, more to himself than at her. “So that’s why you’re doin’ this,” he deduces softly.

Lucy adjusts her glasses with one hand and meets his eyes. “I can’t find out what happened to my family,” she says, “but I can help you go back for your brother.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils as a flush of heat creeps up the back of his neck and shoots a glare at T-Dog. “Merle better be okay,” he says brusquely, “that’s my only word on the matter.”

T-Dog sighs. “I told you,” he retorts, “the zombies can’t get at him. Only thing that’s gonna get through that door is us.”

* * *

 _Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Fairlie-Poplar District._

* * *

Glenn takes a shortcut from the freeway to where the Atlanta Beltline was being constructed pre-apocalypse and parks the U-Haul on the empty railroad track. “I guess we walk from here,” he says and glances at Lucy in the rearview mirror before he asks, “you cool with that?”

Lucy nods and uses her cane to get back on her feet. “I’m not in pain,” she informs him. “I’m okay to walk.”

Daryl hauls open the hatch and jumps out of the back of the U-Haul. Lucy shuffles over to the hatchway and squeaks in surprise when he puts his hands on her waist, lifts her up like it’s almost effortless, and sets her down on the ground.

“Thank you,” Lucy tells him shyly.

Daryl shrugs. “Like I said,” he mutters, “it’s no problem.”

Cath hands Lucy her cane and gives Daryl another shrewd look before she jumps down out of the U-Haul. Glenn peels back a section of the fence he and Nico cut through a month ago, the metal swirling into a familiar spiral. Rick holds the metal back for everyone else before he ducks his head and steps into the other side.

“Merle first,” he asks, “or guns?”

“Merle!” Daryl shouts. “We ain’t even havin’ this conversation!”

Rick shakes his head slowly. “We are,” he retorts. “Glenn, you know the geography. It’s your call.”

Glenn heaves a sigh and hesitates for a few seconds before he makes the call. “Merle’s closest,” he says, “the guns would mean doubling back. Merle first.”

* * *

After they start walking into the city, Daryl’s on edge and too worried about his brother to let himself get distracted by anything or anybody else; but he keeps looking over his shoulder to check on Lucy. There’s something off about her, something Daryl can’t put his finger on until he watches her calmly draw the machete he gave her and shift her weight onto her cane as she stabs a lone shambling zombie through its open mouth. No moment of panic. No hesitation. No fear.

Lucy’s not afraid. Which doesn’t make a lick of sense, because she’s in the most danger of all of them.

 _So either she’s got no fucks left to give_ , Daryl thinks, _or she knows somethin’ that she ain’t tellin’ us_.

Cath stabbing another zombie with a knitting needle actually makes him smile in spite of how anxious he is. It almost makes up for the way these people are looking at him, like Merle is just an excuse to go back for those guns and they’d be better off without him in the long run—and somewhere in the back of his mind Daryl thinks they might be right.

When he was a kid, life without Merle was their dad beating him with a belt until he couldn’t sleep on his back for weeks and reading whatever books the library had because he couldn’t afford to buy his own. Daryl got himself to school and kept his grades up, but he didn’t get to graduate because of his brother. Merle came back from active duty a few days before he turned eighteen. Daryl left home that night and never looked back. When he got older, life without Merle was a lot of things; but living with Merle is what Daryl remembers, and he can’t let himself imagine a life without his brother. It’s as simple as that.

There’s one zombie in the boutique on the ground floor of the Healy building, one undead motherfucker between him and the padlocked door. Daryl kicks it down as soon as T-Dog breaks the chains and charges onto the roof screaming his brother’s name.

Only he’s too late for anything but a bloodcurdling scream, because all that’s left of Merle is blood splatter and a crudely disembodied hand.


	9. The Devil’s Rejects

**Today was getting more interesting by the minute. I just had to hope it was the sort of interesting we’d live to talk about later.**

Mira Grant, _Deadline_

* * *

 _Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. I**  
_Days Gone Bye_  
**Chapter 9**  
The Devil’s Rejects

* * *

 _Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Healy Building._

* * *

Daryl screws his eyes shut and sucks in a sharp breath. “No!” he shouts, wailing like a wounded animal. “ _No!_ ”

Lucy gnaws on her thumbnail as she shuffles around the blood curdling and congealing from the humidity and crouches to pick up something. It’s the book Merle borrowed from her the day before, her annotated collection of T. S. Eliot’s poetry and prose with notes she wrote in the margins in her inscrutably messy cursive. Lucy flips through the book looking for handwriting that isn’t hers, a message for Daryl on where he might’ve gone to lick his wounds or even a _fuck you_ to the people who left him on the roof to rot. There are no last words from Merle in the book, though—only a few drops of blood staining one of the pages next to the first echo of the line _HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME_.

Daryl snarls and swings his crossbow to aim an arrow at T-Dog’s throat with his finger on the trigger, his blood hot in his veins and the raw need to _hurt_ the person who left his brother up here on this roof to die so intense that it eclipses everything else.

Rick holds his Colt to Daryl’s head and clicks the safety off. “I won’t hesitate,” he says gravely. “I don’t care if every zombie in the city hears it.”

Lucy tucks the anthology into her backpack and shuffles over as Daryl sniffles and tightens his grip on his crossbow. When she tentatively puts one hand on his shoulder, he turns to look at her before he lowers his weapon and wraps one of his arms around her to hold her flush against his chest. Lucy muffles an awkward squeak as Daryl squeezes her shoulder and snuffles into her hair. After her moment of panic at the unexpected physical contact subsides, she puts one hand on his waist and smooths her palm up and down his back slowly. When she inhales, Lucy can almost taste the tang of his sweat and smell the rich scent of dirt and leaves from the time he spent hunting in the woods.

Daryl blinks through the tears stinging the corners of his eyes and reaches for Lucy impulsively, instinctually, inexorably. When he squeezes her shoulder to hold her where he wants her, he does it without thinking and in the back of his mind he expects her to push him away. What he doesn’t expect is for Lucy to snuggle closer and start rubbing his back in such a slow and sweet way until his rage seeps out of him so abruptly that he suddenly doesn’t know how to feel anymore.

Lucy is overwhelmingly soft and he’s uncomfortably aware that his dick is half-hard from the subtle pressure of her tits squishing against his chest. Daryl exhales a frustrated noise that unfurls from somewhere low in his throat and lets her go. Rick clicks the safety on and uncurls his trigger finger before he puts his Colt in its holster. Lucy shuffles over to lean on the parapet next to Cath as T-Dog eyes Daryl warily.

Daryl narrows his eyes at him in response. “You got a do-rag or somethin’?” he asks.

T-Dog nods and hands over a black and blue paisley-print bandana he had in his pocket. Daryl crouches and wraps the hand up with a futile kind of hope. After all, even if they found Merle alive they still wouldn’t be able to put that hand back on his wrist.

“I guess the sawblade was too dull for the handcuffs,” Daryl mutters. “Ain’t that a bitch?”

“There’s no way a blade that’s too dull to cut through a metal chain would be able to cut through bone,” Lucy points out. Daryl squints at her over his shoulder. Lucy bites her bottom lip before she looks away. “Sorry,” she mumbles, “not helping.”

What she’s not saying is that Merle probably got heatstroke from being out here for hours before he cut himself loose. It’s the only way to explain why he chopped off his own hand instead of sawing through the cuffs. Glenn winces as the archer puts the disembodied hand in his backpack and gulps at the muted stench of raw meat and decay.

Daryl swallows hard. “Merle must’ve used a tourniquet,” he says. “Maybe his belt. There’d be much more blood if he didn’t.”

T-Dog goes to get the bag of tools he dropped and keep his promise to Dale while Cath scoops up the hacksaw and cleans the blade with a wad of tissues. Glenn adjusts his backpack on his shoulders and glances at Lucy as Daryl starts tracking the trail of blood that Merle left behind. “You okay?” he asks.

“You’re probably not used to heat like this,” Rick adds as they follow Daryl through a rooftop entrance that leads down another flight of stairs into a part of the building they haven’t seen before, “being from the Pacific Northwest and everything.”

Lucy shrugs. “I went to grad school in the Midwest,” she informs him, “it was cold as balls in winter and in summer the air was so thick with humidity that it felt like soup. Also, hot weather is good for my joints. I can take the heat if that means I don’t have to be in constant pain.”

Rick cocks his head in confusion as they reach the landing. Cath snorts as soon as the words _cold as balls_ come out of her best friend’s mouth. “Lucy has rheumatoid arthritis,” she explains, “and she has chronic joint pain because of that.”

“So that’s what the cane is for,” Rick deduces.

“Yup.” Lucy pops the _p_ and draws her machete with a slick metallic sound.

Daryl flicks his gaze back over his shoulder to check on her before he stalks down the next flight of stairs with the vigilance of a man on the hunt. “Merle!” he shouts. “You in here?”

* * *

There’s zombie in the corporate office on the topmost floor of the Healy building with her tongue hanging out of the gory, gaping maw where her mouth should be. Daryl shoots her in the head and holds the arrow he used in his hand instead of nocking it because he might have to use it for stabbing more zombies up close and personal.

Lucy has to force herself not to look at the books on the shelves in the office. It’s a waste to leave them in this dead zone, but now is not the time for her special interest.

Glenn smiles at her. “There’s nothing worth reading,” he whispers conspiratorially. “Unless you like self-help books or the autobiographies of Donald Trump.”

Lucy shakes her head and shudders melodramatically. “Donald Trump is the worst,” she whispers back as Cath steps into the reception area to find two zombies whose brains were bashed in with a wrench. Dale’s wrench.

Daryl snorts as Cath hands the wrench to T-Dog. “Had enough in him to take out these two sumbitches one handed,” he says, nocking the arrow with arrogance he’s using to mask the fear gnawing at him. “Toughest asshole I ever met, my brother. Feed him a hammer, he’d crap out nails.”

“Anyone can pass out from blood loss,” Rick points out. “No matter how tough they are.”

Daryl scoffs at that before he tracks the trail of blood down another flight of stairs and into a kitchen. “Merle!” he shouts again.

Rick grits his teeth around a frustrated noise. “We’re not alone here, remember?” he whispers.

“Screw that,” Daryl whispers back, “he could be bleedin’ out. Ya’ said so yourself.”

Lucy shuffles into the kitchen and touches the edge of the stove with two fingertips. There are four propane canisters lit with pale blue flames burning on the counter, a metal grill press next to Merle’s brown leather belt, and more blood splatter dried on the stovetop. Lucy chokes on the lingering smell of meat cooking and covers her mouth with one hand as Rick picks up the press and examines the iron surface.

“What’s that burned stuff?” Glenn wants to know.

“It’s skin,” Lucy mumbles in between her fingers as her stomach churns with a visceral squelch of nausea, “he cauterized the stump to stop the bleeding.”

Daryl slants his gaze to the former sheriff. “Told ya’ he was tough,” he says. “Nobody can kill Merle but Merle.”

Rick huffs. “Don’t take that on faith,” he mutters, “he’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Yeah?” Daryl snorts and stalks over to a window that Merle shattered on his way out. “Didn’t stop him from bustin’ outta this deathtrap.”

Glenn frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing visibly under the brim of his baseball cap. “Wait,” he blurts out, “he left the building? Why the hell would he do that?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Daryl retorts before he crouches to peer out the window and finds the broken glass and bloody rags on the sill. “Merle’s out there alone, as far as he knows. Doin’ what he’s gotta do…” he glances over his shoulder at Lucy as she uses the handle of her cane to get a cast iron soup pot down off a high shelf and dumps her bullets into it before she zips her backpack up around it, “…survivin’.”

“You call that surviving?” T-Dog asks dubiously. “Just wandering out in the street, maybe passing out? What are his odds out there?”

“No worse than bein’ handcuffed and left to rot by you sorry pricks!” Daryl shouts. T-Dog looks away while Glenn hides his face in the hollow of his palm. Daryl turns to glare at Rick. “You couldn’t kill him,” he adds. “Ain’t so worried about some dumb dead bastard.”

Rich arches his eyebrows at the archer like a challenge. “What about a thousand dumb dead bastards?” he asks. “Different story?”

“Why don’t you take a tally?” Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and huffs. “Do what you want. I’m gonna go get him.”

Rick heaves a sigh and puts a hand out to stop him in his tracks. “Daryl, wait.”

“Get your hands off me!” Daryl snarls. “You can’t stop me!”

“I don’t blame you,” Rick says calmly, “he’s family, I get that. I went through hell to find mine. I know exactly how you feel. Merle can’t get far with that injury. We could help you check a few blocks around, but only if you keep a level head.”

Daryl swallows thickly. “I could do that,” he says quietly.

T-Dog shakes his head slowly. “Only if we get those guns first,” he says. “I’m not strolling the streets of Atlanta with just my good intentions, okay?”

* * *

There’s a small office on the second floor of the building where Glenn finds a permanent marker to draw a map of the area on the floor. It’s dreary, with the walls painted a soul-crushing beige and sunlight filtering through the blinds in shreds.

Lucy flops onto one of the desks and turns her earpiece on. “What’s happening at the quarry?” she asks.

“Andrea and Amy caught all of the fish,” Kate informs her, “ _all of them_ , and Jim is digging a bunch of graves. I think he started as soon as the sun came up. Dale is trying to get Shane to stage an intervention for him because he thinks heatstroke fried his brain.”

Cath stops pacing back and forth between the desks and folds her arms in a way that almost looks like she’s giving herself a hug. Lucy gnaws on her thumbnail without biting through it. “Merle has left the building,” she murmurs, “and we’re going to get the bag of guns before we try to find him. I have a bad feeling about this.”

“If you’re not back in two hours,” Kate says, “Nico and I are coming to get you and Cath out of the city.”

Lucy sighs. “Okay,” she says.

Daryl sits on the edge of the desk and props his crossbow against its side before he turns to look at her over his shoulder. “How far’s the range on that thing?” he asks.

“It had a five-mile radius,” Lucy answers, “but Nico boosted that to ten miles. Approximately.”

“Quarry’s about four miles from here,” Daryl mutters. “If Merle somehow makes it back to camp while we’re out lookin’ for him, you let me know.”

Lucy bites her lip and nods. “Of course,” she tells him softly.

Daryl glances down at her mouth and stares at her lips for a few seconds too long before he looks away. It sucks that he can’t even be pissed at her, because he knows she’s not doing anything to get him all hot and bothered on purpose. Lucy is just trying to help. Daryl is the one who can’t stop thinking about her because he doesn’t want to start thinking about his brother dying in the street and turning into a zombie. Merle is all he’s got, but that shit goes both ways—the sooner they get those guns, the sooner he finds his brother.

 _Should be all that matters_ , Daryl thinks.  _Would be, if I’d never met Lucy_.

Whatever she means to him, he’s going to have to wait to figure it out. Daryl narrows his eyes at the inscrutable map inked on the floor. “So,” he says. “What’s the plan?”

Glenn thumbs the brim of his baseball cap before he answers. “I’m the plan,” he says.


	10. Everybody Scream

**I will show you something different from either**  
**your shadow at morning striding behind you**  
**or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;**  
**I will show you fear in a handful of dust.**

T. S. Eliot, _The Waste Land_

* * *

 _Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. I**  
_Days Gone Bye_  
**Chapter 10**  
Everybody Scream

* * *

 _Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Forsyth-Walton Building._

* * *

Glenn explains his plan before they split up. Daryl, Lucy, and Cath are supposed to wait in the fenced-in mouth of the alleyway for Glenn to run up the street and get the guns while Rick and T-Dog are covering his ass two blocks away in case he gets cut off and he can’t go back to where he started from. It’s not a bad plan, since the massive horde that gathered by the tank to feast on the horse has wandered off somewhere else. There are a few stragglers, but they won’t be a threat if they don’t swarm. What capacity the zombies have for herd mentality has been limited to shambling around until they find each other so far. No hivemind. No ambush tactics. No method of communication more sophisticated than moaning ominously.

 _If the virus gets smarter that’s going to change_ , Lucy thinks as she climbs down the ladder on the side of a building into the alley, _but for now we still have the tactical advantage. Which is how humans have adapted to survive as a species ever since we crawled out of the primordial ooze_.

Daryl glances up from the street below and is almost disappointed to see that she’s wearing leggings under her dress, but he likes that she’s too smart to walk around without protective legwear and that she’s wearing kickass leather boots.

Lucy stops at the bottom rung of the ladder. _Darwinism isn’t about physical fitness_ , she thinks as Daryl puts his hands on her waist to keep her from hitting the ground hard enough to hurt her ankle. _It’s about how organisms adapt to survive in hostile environments_ , she adjusts her glasses and steps back to let Cath get down, _and being adaptable is a skill I acquired pre-apocalypse_.

“You good?” Daryl murmurs.

Lucy ducks her head in a quick nod before she shuffles down the alleyway with the handle of her cane sticking out of her backpack. When she isn’t using it, she walks with a limp so subtle that he can only see it because he’s watching her like a hawk.

There’s a plethora of trash littering the alley—some in black plastic Hefty bags, some loose and scattered over the pavement—and a pair of dumpsters standing guard by the side of a building. Glenn stares out into the street from behind one of them while Daryl stops and draws back his bowstring, Cath steps closer to the chain link fence, and Lucy slumps against the rough slate brick of the building on the other side of the alley.

“You got some balls for a Chinaman,” Daryl says as Cath opens the gate for Glenn.

“I’m Korean,” Glenn retorts. Like he’s used to racists saying crap like that to his face and he’s just tired of the microaggressions at this point.

Daryl shrugs and nocks an arrow as Glenn runs out into the street. “Whatever,” he says.

“It’s not just ‘Whatever,’” Cath tells him sharply. “It’s who Glenn is.”

Lucy sighs. “Asian ethnicities and cultures aren’t interchangeable,” she adds.

Daryl frowns and makes a frustrated noise low in his throat. “Sorry,” he mutters.

“Glenn is the one you should be apologizing to,” Cath says, “not Lucy. It’s not like you tried to give her a compliment rooted in dehumanizing racial stereotypes invented by a gross British historian that aren’t even about her race—or Glenn’s, for that matter, because he’s not even Chinese—”

Lucy holds up one hand to shut her best friend up and shoots Cath an urgent look as she draws her machete. Cath shuts her mouth and makes a fist, holding her knitting needles in the space between her knuckles to throw a punch and stab at the same time. Daryl tenses at the sound of footsteps on the pavement and rises up from behind the dumpster with his crossbow drawn.

Miguel stops dead in his tracks. “Whoa, don’t shoot me!” he yelps and holds up both hands in surrender. “What do you want?”

“I’m lookin’ for my brother,” Daryl snarls, “he’s hurt real bad. You seen him?”

Miguel glances at the girls before he yells, “Ayúdame!”

“Shut up!” Daryl hisses. “You’re gonna bring the zombies down on us. Answer me. You seen my brother?”

“Ayúdame!” Miguel yells again.

“¡Cállate, carajo,” Lucy snaps back, “o te van a escuchar.”

Miguel gapes at her before he yells for help once more, with feeling. Daryl uses the blunt end of his crossbow to smack him upside the head and knock him down. Miguel squirms as Daryl covers his mouth with one hand to keep him quiet, and that’s when things go from bad to worse. Cath screams as someone grabs her from behind and drags her into the street. Lucy turns and catches a glimpse of her best friend’s brown eyes going even wider in fear before another man shoves her against the wall and everything goes starrily, startlingly black.

Then someone yowls into the abyss. Lucy grits her teeth at the agonizing sound and tries to swallow the pain. There’s blood gushing from her left temple, viscous and sticky on the pads of her fingers and dripping slickly down her cheek. When she opens her eyes, Cath and Glenn are gone and Daryl is crouched in front of her. Lucy blinks at the solid feeling of his hand on her shoulder, how gently he tilts her chin up, the intensity of his eyes.

 _I thought his eyes were grey or hazel before_ , she thinks, _but they’re so blue. Why couldn’t I see that until now?_

“You okay?” Daryl asks her in the softest voice she’s ever heard come out of his mouth.

Lucy glances down at the blood on her fingertips and groans instead of trying to articulate a more coherent answer to his question. Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils before he growls and slams Miguel into the side of the building. There are blotches of angry red blooming on his skin, the beginnings of bruises from the beating he took, and he’s not moving like a hunter now; he’s moving like a berserker, slapdash with blind rage thrown in for flair.

“Whoa!” Rick shouts as he and T-Dog come running. “Stop it!”

Daryl shakes his head so fast he almost discombobulates himself as Rick tries to hold him back. “I’m gonna kick his nuts up in his throat!” he shouts.

“Lemme go!” Miguel yelps.

T-Dog shoves him back against the brick wall. “Chill out,” he retorts.

Lucy shuts her eyes and sucks in a sharp breath. “Daryl,” she says his name through clenched teeth and he stills at the pain trembling audibly in her voice, “that’s not helping.”

Rick watches her wobble as she uses her cane to get back on her feet. “You okay, Lucy?” he asks.

“I probably have a mild concussion,” Lucy informs him, “but I’ve had a lot worse. Just don’t let me pass out until we’re back at camp and Cath and Glenn are safe and sound.”

“Guys!” T-Dog says urgently. “Guys, we’re cut off!”

Rick stops trying to hold Daryl back, grabs the bag of guns, and slings it over his shoulder. “Get to the ladder,” he says before he snatches up his hat, “go!”

Lucy picks up the knitting needle Cath dropped, half of a whole, and stabs the zombies on the other side of the fence in the eye one by one until only a pile of dead bodies remains. Daryl scoops an arm around her waist and Lucy is mortified that she actually swoons, the wooziness from her concussion making her flush even brighter than before.

“C’mon,” Daryl says as more zombies moan in the distance. “Let’s go.”

* * *

 _Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Healy Building._

* * *

Lucy keeps a first-aid kit on her at all times because she’s been immunocompromised for almost a decade—and even though she hasn’t been taking her immunosuppressants since the beginning of the global outbreak, old habits are hard to break. Once they’re back in the office on the second floor of the Healy building, she uses alcohol swabs to disinfect her wound and wipe the blood off her face while Daryl paces back and forth between the desks because he’s too pissed off to sit down and be still.

T-Dog sits in one of the chairs with his arms folded over the back while Rick eyeballs their unwanted guest. “Jesus, man…” he shakes his head. “What the hell happened back there?”

“I told ya’,” Daryl says, “this little turd and his douchebag friends came outta nowhere and jumped us.”

“You’re the one who jumped me, puto,” Miguel says petulantly, “screaming about trying to find his brother like it’s my damn fault.”

“They took Cath and Glenn,” Daryl mutters, “could’ve taken Merle too.”

“Merle?” Miguel scoffs. “What kind of hick name is that? I wouldn’t name my dog Merle.”

Daryl snarls low in his throat and narrows his eyes to slits before he lunges for Miguel. Rick stops him in his tracks and shoves him back. “Damn it, Daryl,” he snaps, “back off.”

“Merle is French,” Lucy mumbles, “by way of the Latin _merula_. It means ‘blackbird.’ Daryl is a French name, too. It means ‘huckleberry.’ Lucy is also French, by way of the Latin _lux_. It means ‘light.’ Catherine is French, rooted in the Greek _katharos_. It means ‘purity.’ Glenn is Old Irish. It means ‘mountain valley.’ Theodore comes from the Greek name Theodōros, meaning ‘gift of the gods.’ Rick is short for Richard, a name derived from the proto-Germanic _ric_ and _hard_. It means ‘strong leader.’ Miguel is the Spanish derivative of the Latin name Michael. Which is rooted in the Hebrew name Mikha-el. It means ‘who is like god?’”

T-Dog arches his eyebrows at Lucy while Rick looks at her incredulously. “How do you know all that?” he asks.

Lucy shrugs. “I love words,” she informs him, “and etymology.”

Daryl glares at Rick and stalks over to the backpack that Glenn left behind. “Want to see what happened to the last guy that pissed me off?” he asks before he unwraps Merle’s disembodied hand and drops it into Miguel’s lap. Miguel shrieks and squirms until he falls out of the chair he was sitting on. Merle’s hand flops onto the floor, the skin a necrotic gray, the fingers gnarled from rigor mortis. Daryl wraps his hands around Miguel’s throat and squeezes hard enough to choke the air out of him. “Start with the feet this time,” he growls.

Lucy sighs. “Daryl,” she says, “that’s enough.”

Daryl lets Miguel go and huffs before he backs off. Rick squats to look Miguel in the eyes. “Those men you were with took our friends,” he says, “all we want to do is talk to ’em. See if we can work something out.”

“Así lo espero,” Miguel says, “yo lo dudo.”

Rick glances at Lucy. “What did he say?” he wants to know.

“‘I hope we can,’” Lucy translates, “‘but I doubt it.’”

* * *

 _Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Nursing Home._

* * *

After that Miguel tells Rick where to find Glenn: in a building made of weathered brick and mortar with heavy wooden doors. There’s a tag spray-painted in red on the wall, something that could be a gang symbol or street art. Daryl, Rick, and T-Dog try to get Lucy to stay behind. It doesn’t work. Not with one of her best friends in danger. Lucy walks faster than all of them in spite of the pain in her joints and stops in the charred skeletal remains of the building across the courtyard with its brick walls burnt from red to black and waits for T-Dog to get in position while Rick loads shells into his twelve-gauge shotgun.

Daryl glares down at Miguel. “One wrong move,” he says, “and you get an arrow in the ass. Just so you know.”

Miguel snorts. “G’s gonna take that arrow out of my ass and shove it up yours,” he retorts. “Just so you know.”

“G?” Rick asks.

“Guillermo,” Miguel clarifies, “he’s the man here.”

“Okay then,” Rick says. “Let’s go see Guillermo.”

Lucy stops gnawing anxiously on her thumbnail at the name. “Wait,” she says. “Guillermo Estavez?”

Miguel squints at her skeptically. “You know G?” he asks.

“You could say that,” Lucy answers. “I saved his life.”


	11. Bring Her Down to Crippletown

**You either trust or distrust coincidence.**  
**It’s either small doses of magic**  
**pulling you to your appointed destiny**  
**or the devil trying to lead you down**  
**to the thorns.**

Toby Barlow, _Sharp Teeth_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. II**  
_The Heart’s Desire_  
**Chapter 11**  
Bring Her Down to Crippletown

* * *

_Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Nursing Home._

* * *

While the building on the other side of the courtyard was napalmed during the bombing of Atlanta, the courtyard itself is full of plants that have been growing for longer than six weeks. Ivy clinging to the walls. Weeds sprouting through the wreckage. Dandelion flowers gone to seed. Lucy finds a patch of wild strawberries behind a tarnished furnace with a tree growing out of a hole in the metal and crouches down to see if any of them are ripe enough to eat. Rick holds Miguel at gunpoint and Daryl aims his crossbow at the kid’s ass as the doors open.

Guillermo emerges from the shadows and the sunlight throws the people standing behind him into chiaroscuro. There’s an air of subtle charisma about him, a quiet strength in the way that he walks tall. “You okay, little man?” he wants to know.

“They’re gonna cut off my feet, mi carnal,” Miguel tells him.

Guillermo raises his eyebrows at the badge Rick is wearing. “Cops do that?” he asks.

“No,” Miguel turns to look at Daryl over his shoulder and flails his hands awkwardly, “not him. This redneck puto here. He cut off some dude’s hand, man. He showed it to me.”

Daryl clenches his teeth and exhales an angry huff through his nose. “Shut up,” he says.

“He wants Miguelito’s feet?” Guillermo stuffs his hands in his pockets and looks at Rick. “That’s pretty sick, man.”

“We were hoping more for a calm discussion,” Rick tells him.

Guillermo snorts. “That hillbilly jumps Felipe’s little cousin, beats on him, threatens to cut off his feet, Felipe gets an arrow in the ass, and you want a calm discussion?” he shakes his head slowly. “You fascinate me.”

“Heat of the moment,” Rick says. “Mistakes were made on both sides. Your man there,” he cocks his head at Jorge, “gave my friend here a concussion.”

Lucy shuffles out from behind the furnace. “Hi,” she says.

Guillermo smiles at her in spite of everything that’s going on around them. “Gordita,” he says, “is that you?”

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips. “Please don’t call me that,” she mumbles.

Guillermo flicks his gaze to the bandage on her face. “Jorge do that to you?” he asks. When she nods, he shoots Jorge a look so harsh the other man flinches and skulks back inside. Guillermo walks over to Lucy and moves to brush her hair away from her face to get a closer look at the gash on her temple.

“Hey,” Daryl snarls and slips his finger onto the trigger of his crossbow without thinking it through, “don’t you touch her.”

Guillermo frowns. “Who’s this dude to you, anyway?” he asks.

Lucy shifts her weight onto her cane and steps back so he’s not standing too close to her. While she doesn’t see Guillermo as a threat, she doesn’t like to be touched and being touched by men always makes her anxious; even if she knows this man in particular isn’t going to hurt her. Daryl is the exception that proves the rule, for some reason. “Daryl’s a friend,” she says, “but I don’t want to talk about him. I want to talk about Cath and Glenn. I saved your ass, Guillermo, and you owe me. I want my friends back.”

Guillermo squares his shoulders. “You’re putting me in a tough spot, Gordita. You saved my life, but this isn’t just about me,” he cocks his head and glances at Daryl, “my people got attacked too. Where’s the compensation for their pain and suffering? More to the point,” he slants his gaze to Rick before he asks, “Where’s my bag of guns?”

“You’re mistaken,” Rick tells him.

“I don’t think so,” Guillermo says flatly.

“About it being yours,” Rick clarifies, “it’s my bag of guns.”

“That bag was in the street,” Guillermo retorts. “Anybody could come around and say it was theirs. I’m supposed to take your word?”

Lucy feels the tension crawl through her body as the other men emerge from the shadows with their guns drawn and props her cane against the furnace before she draws both of her revolvers. Guillermo doesn’t miss how Daryl slowly moves to put himself in the line of fire instead of her. “Aside from mi Gordita,” he says, “what’s to stop my people from unloading on you right here and now and I take what’s mine?”

“You could do that,” Rick says, “or not.”

Guillermo follows his line of sight to where T-Dog is positioned on the roof of a building that overlooks the courtyard with a sniper rifle.

“Come on, man…” T-Dog mutters, “make the trade. Please.”

Guillermo snorts. “¡Oye!” he yells, and two men on the roof of his stronghold bring a man with a bag over his head to the edge of the crumbling brick. When one of them pulls the bag off, Glenn makes a futile attempt to speak through the duct tape over his mouth as the other man holds his arms behind his back. “I see two options,” Guillermo says. “You come back with Miguel and my bag of guns and everybody walks, or you come back locked and loaded and we’ll see which side spills more blood.”

Lucy points one of her revolvers at his head. “I have a third option,” she says in a soft, deadly voice. “You keep Glenn as a hostage and give my best friend back to me in good faith.”

Guillermo nods. “Jorge,” he says, “give mi Gordita what she wants.”

Cath has been crying. It’s obvious from the way she sniffles as soon as she opens her eyes to see Lucy standing in the light. Lucy holsters one of her revolvers and aims the other at Jorge as Cath shrugs him off and throws herself at her best friend. There’s grimy residue around her mouth and on her wrists, the adhesive from the tape clinging to her skin. Lucy exhales a breath she that didn’t know she’d been holding and puts an arm around Cath’s skinny waist. Cath buries her face in the crook of her neck and Lucy tries not to grimace at the smell of sweat and motor oil stuck in her dark curls.

“I’d say we’re even now,” Guillermo says.

Lucy glares at him over Cath’s shoulder. “Nope,” she pops the _p_ sound. “Not even close.”

* * *

_Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Healy Building._

* * *

Nico is waiting in front of the Healy building to pick up Cath in her jeep. Kate is back at camp in case Merle somehow made it out of the city during their Mexican standoff with Guillermo and his men. Lucy gives Cath the soup pot, canned food, and propane canisters she found in the kitchen upstairs. It makes no sense to leave perfectly good supplies behind, after all. Nico promises to pick her up before dark and drives away. Lucy hobbles back upstairs while Rick is doing another inventory of their guns and ammo before he lightens the load in the bag and adds two more rounds to the four in the cylinder of his Colt.

Daryl slants his gaze to Lucy as she flops into one of the folding chairs. “That name he called you,” he mutters. “What’s it mean?”

Lucy meets his eyes for a few seconds before she looks away. “Gordita means ‘little fat girl,’” she informs him, “but it’s not always insulting in Spanish. Actually, it can be kind of…intimate…” her cheeks flush as she bites her lip and Daryl has a vivid fantasy of kissing her hard and tugging her bottom lip between his teeth before she adds, “…because the word can have a sexual connotation.”

Daryl snorts as heat creeps up the back of his neck. “Guess that means he’s sweet on you, don’t it?”

Lucy shrugs. “I don’t know,” she mumbles.

Daryl squints at her, scrutinizing. “Okay,” he says and exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils before he asks, “you like him?”

Lucy shakes her head slowly to avoid making the pain in her head worse. “Daryl,” she says his name softly and meets his eyes without shying away for once, “my last two boyfriends were an emotionally abusive jerk and a rapist. I don’t trust myself to like anyone that way.”

 _Guess that explains how damn oblivious she is_ , Daryl thinks. _It ain’t ’cause she don’t feel nothin’ for me, or Guillermo, or whoever. It’s ’cause she thinks she can’t trust herself to feel nothin’ for nobody_.

Daryl clenches his jaw and holds her gaze as the desire to prove her wrong flares and burns deep in his chest. Lucy blushes harder and smiles at him shyly before she looks away.

Rick clears his throat. “What exactly happened between you and Guillermo?” he wants to know.

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips. “Kate and I went to a pharmacy about a month ago to refill my prescriptions,” she informs him. “Guillermo was there with a man named Carlito, and they helped me find the meds I needed. When the zombies got into the pharmacy and sniffed us out, he almost got swarmed. I saved him, we spent most of the afternoon hiding out in a bookstore, and we talked. I don’t think he’s a bad person. I think he’s just trying to survive, and he needs guns for that just as much as we do.”

Daryl nods, brusquely. “Them guns are worth more ’n gold,” he murmurs, “gold won’t protect your family or put food on the table…” he scoffs, “…and you’re gonna give that up for that kid?”

“I might agree if I knew we’d get Glenn back,” T-Dog adds, “but you think that vato across the way is just gonna hand him over?”

Miguel frowns. “You calling G a liar?” he asks.

Daryl crouches down to get in his face and smacks him upside the head. “You part of this?” he shouts. “You wanna hold onto your teeth?”

“Question is,” T-Dog says, “do you trust that man’s word?”

“No,” Daryl retorts. “Question is, what’re you willin’ to bet on it? Could be more ’n them guns. Could be your life. Could be all of our lives. Glenn worth that to you?”

Rick puts his Colt back in its holster. “What life I have I owe to him,” he says. “I was nobody to Glenn—just some idiot stuck in a tank—and he could’ve walked away, but he didn’t. Neither will I.”

* * *

_Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Nursing Home._

* * *

Daryl leaves his crossbow behind in favor of a twelve-gauge shotgun and a handgun sticking out of the waistband of his pants, because they’re past the point of subtlety. Lucy starts to feel the burn as they walk back through the courtyard with Miguel at gunpoint, her inflamed joints sending dull twinges up from her ankle to her hipbone every time she takes a step.

 _Okay_ , she thinks. _What fresh hell is this?_

Rick is wearing his sheriff’s hat to show he means business. Daryl shoves poor Miguel, who’s tied up with electrical tape and gagged with a dirty hand towel, through the open doors. T-Dog looks around the room and frowns because he can’t see Glenn anywhere.

Guillermo is standing in the center of a mechanic’s garage lit up with fluorescent lights, the whir of a generator quietly resonating through the walls. “I see my guns,” he says, “but they’re not all in the bag.”

“That’s because they’re not yours,” Rick tells him sharply. “I thought I mentioned that.”

“I don’t think you fully appreciate the gravity of the situation,” Guillermo says.

“No, I’m pretty clear,” Rick says flatly. “You have your man. I want mine.”

Tension fulminates in the space between them and seeps into every nook and cranny of the garage, suffusing the humid air. It escalates quickly from negotiations to threats. Until an old lady hobbles into the garage calling for Felipe.

“Abuela,” Felipe says, “go back with the others now.”

 _Wait_ , Lucy thinks. _What others?_

“Get that old lady outta the line of fire!” Daryl shouts.

“Abuela,” Guillermo huffs, “listen to your mijo, okay? This is not the place for you right now.”

“Mr. Gilbert is having trouble breathing,” she tells Felipe urgently, “he needs his medicine. Carlito didn’t find it.”

Guillermo heaves a sigh while Rick tells Abuela that he’s not trying to arrest her grandson because now everyone knows the vatos aren’t what they seem. Lucy blinks owlishly as Abuela takes Rick by the hand and leads them all through a lush garden into a nursing home before she takes Felipe to find an inhaler for Mr. Gilbert. Glenn is waiting in the atrium with a solemn look on his face. T-Dog glances up and stares at the wooden cross on the wall for a long moment, like he’s waiting for a miracle.

Rick takes Guillermo aside to talk to him while Carlito stitches Lucy up. When that’s done, Guillermo leads them to a smaller room where Lucy flops into an armchair and exhales a soft whoosh of air. Daryl glares as Guillermo hands her a cold can of Dr. Pepper with condensation beading on the metal like pearls of sweat on swine.

“We’ve encountered people since things fell apart,” Guillermo explains, “the worst kind, plunderers, the kind who take by force.”

Rick shakes his head slowly. “No,” he says, “that’s not who we are.”

“How was I to know?” Guillermo asks, “my people got attacked and you show up with Miguel hostage. Appearances can be deceiving.”

“Guess the world changed,” T-Dog says.

Lucy snorts. “It hasn’t,” she mumbles.

Guillermo nods, a slow descent of his chin. “It’s the same as it ever was,” he says, “the weak get taken…” he watches Lucy drink her soda while he talks and turns to look at Rick before he adds, “…the people here, they all look to me now. I don’t even know why.”

“It’s because they can,” Rick tells him softly.

* * *

_Saturday, 14 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 62._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

After they leave the nursing home, Lucy waits for Nico to pick her up while Rick, Glenn, and T-Dog help Daryl look for Merle everywhere within a ten-block radius. Lucy doesn’t say anything on the drive back to camp. Which is odd, because she hates uncomfortable silences and having anxiety makes all silences uncomfortable.

Nico glances at her sidelong as she parks the jeep behind T-Dog’s church van. “What happened to you today?” she asks.

Lucy gnaws on her thumbnail instead of answering because she can’t stop thinking about it. Daryl holding her flush against his chest, how hard his lean muscular body is compared to hers, the intense way he looks at her. _No_ , she thinks. _I refuse to do the thing I did in high school and start crushing on a guy I barely even know just because he’s nice to me. I’m twenty-seven, not sixteen. I am old enough to know better now_. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she mumbles.

Nico shrugs. If she knows Lucy, not wanting to talk about it now means she’s going to want to talk about it later. Nico can wait. “Okay,” she says before she gets out of the car and walks back to the campfire.

* * *

Lucy skips the fish fry to curl up with her puppy because she doesn’t have the spoons for more human interaction that night, but tragically the universe gives no fucks.

Amy knocks on the door of her trailer while Lucy is making herself a grilled cheese sandwich and smiles at her like she wants something. “Hey,” she says, “the RV’s out of toilet paper, but…” she slips the _uh_ sound into something more conspiratorial, “…I know you’ve got the good stuff.”

Lucy rolls her eyes and flails one hand at the bulk package from Costco stashed under her mattress. “Help yourself,” she says.

Amy takes a few rolls of toilet paper and a shambling zombie grabs her as soon as she opens the door. Lucy drops her sandwich and scrambles to shove her own arm into its mouth before she draws her revolver and shoots it right between its ghostly eyes. Amy screams as its body flops onto the ground in a pile of rotting flesh and bones. Lucy grits her teeth at the sound as the pain in her head combines with the pain in her body to create a feedback loop of _fuck this shit_. Amy looks down at the blood oozing from the bite with eyes so wide and fearful that it almost makes her laugh in spite of the ringing in her ears, the ricochet of the gunshot resonating as the sound withers in the night air.

“It’s okay,” Lucy tells her. “I’m immune.”


	12. American Witch

**Offer the wolves your arm only from the elbow down. Leave tourniquet space. Do not offer them your calves. Do not offer them your side. Do not let them near your femoral artery, your jugular. Give them only your arm.**

Daphne Gottlieb, “Fifteen Ways to Stay Alive”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. II**  
_The Heart’s Desire_  
**Chapter 12**  
American Witch

* * *

_Sunday, 15 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 63._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

When the morning comes, the bite on Lucy’s forearm has scabbed over because she blew the zombie’s brains out before it could really sink its teeth into her flesh. There’s a scar on her other arm that mirrors the fresh bite, living proof of her immunity. Kate and Cath sit on the edge of the mattress that occupies most of the space at the back end of the trailer while Nico leans up against the wall and folds her arms. Lucy winces at the pain in her hip and groans internally, externally, eternally.

“So,” Nico says grimly, “Amy knows.”

Lucy heaves a sigh and nods, a slow descent of her chin. “Yup,” she mutters and pops the _p_ sound softly.

“Andrea knows too,” Kate says, “she came running as soon as she heard Amy scream and saw the bite. I had to draw on her to keep her from shooting Lucy before she could explain.”

“Lucy can’t keep a secret or tell a lie to save her life,” Cath points out. “We knew someone would find out eventually.”

Nico snorts and smiles at Lucy slantwise. “True,” she says.

Lucy huffs indignantly even though she knows her friends aren’t wrong. Truth be told, she’s always been an abysmal liar. “Andrea and Amy knowing isn’t the problem,” she clarifies, “the problem is whether they believe I’m immune or not. I can’t prove it without making everyone wait three days to see that I won’t amplify. After what happened last night, they might just shoot me.”

“We won’t let that happen,” Cath says vehemently. “We aren’t losing anybody else.”

Lucy yawns and breaks the heavy silence that ensues. “Okay,” she exhales the word in a soft whoosh of air, “I’m going to take a nap before my headache evolves into a migraine. Wake me up if someone comes to put me out of this misery.”

* * *

Cath stays vigilant and sits on the front step of the trailer while Kate and Nico go back to cleaning up the mess of the massacre that happened the night before. Lucy passed out in the aftermath of her concussion sometime before sunrise, but almost everyone else has been up all night dealing with the dead and waiting to burn or bury their bodies in the light.

Daryl is working out his frustration by cracking skulls with a pickaxe, going through the repetitive motions to avoid thinking about Lucy having a mildly traumatic brain injury or Merle driving around one-handed in a wasteland full of undead fuckers.

 _What if her brain is bleedin’?_ he thinks. _What if she dies? I lost Merle yesterday. I ain’t gonna lose her, too_.

After he glances over his shoulder at her trailer and squints as the early morning sunlight glints off the solar paneling, he notices that Jim is staring up at the sky and spacing out while the sweat on his face drips from under his baseball cap. Daryl grunts to get his attention. “Wake up, Jimbo. We got some work t’ do,” he says before he goes to help Morales drag one of the men who died the night before to the smoldering pile of putrid corpses.

“What are you guys doing?” Glenn asks, his voice pitching higher in distress. “This is for the zombies. Our people go over there.”

“What’s the difference?” Daryl asks. “They’re all infected.”

Glenn chokes back tears and shakes his head. “Our people go in that row over there,” he says brokenly, his Adam’s apple bobbing spasmodically in his throat. “We don’t burn them! We bury them. Understand?”

Daryl snorts. “You reap what you sow!” he shouts.

Morales drops the body in the burial row with the others and makes an exasperated noise. “You know what?” he huffs. “Shut up, man.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “Y’all left my brother for dead!” he retorts. “You had this comin’!”

“Okay.” Nico folds her arms in a way that makes her biceps flex and raises her eyebrows at him like a challenge. “Why are you still here?” she asks.

Daryl narrows his eyes at her. “What?” he snaps.

“You could’ve taken your truck and gone looking for Merle,” Nico clarifies. “Why didn’t you?”

Daryl flicks his gaze to the trailer before he swallows hard and looks down at the dirt. Lucy is the first person who hasn’t treated him like dirt in a long time, and that means something to him. Hell, it means pretty much everything. “You know why,” he mutters in a soft voice that makes him sound more vulnerable than she ever thought he could.

“I do,” Nico tells him with the same cheerfully threatening grin she gave him the day they met. “I just wanted to know if you knew it too.”

Daryl actually pouts at how easy it was for her to manipulate him into saying exactly what she wanted to hear. “You gonna tell her?” he asks.

Nico doesn’t get a chance to answer that because Jacqui shrieks, “A zombie got him! A zombie bit Jim!”

Jim looks stricken as everyone slowly moves to surround him. “I’m okay,” he says desperately, “I’m okay.”

Daryl squints at the blood oozing through the sweat and dust smeared the front of Jim’s filthy shirt. “Show it to us,” he shouts.

Jim feebly tries to use a shovel to make them back off. Shane tells him to put it down before T-Dog grabs him from behind to hold his arms behind his back while Daryl yanks his shirt up, exposing the wound. “I’m okay,” he says even more desperately as they all back away from him in horror, “I’m okay.”

Amy swallows hard and shakes her head slowly. “No,” she tells him softly, “you’re not. We all saw the news reports that said this virus inhibits hemostasis and keeps wounds from healing. If you weren’t infected, the bite would’ve stopped bleeding hours ago.”

Jim slumps his shoulders in defeat sits on a crate near the RV while the others huddle around the ashes of the campfire from the night before to talk about how to handle the situation. Nico turns on her earpiece to let Cath listen in.

“I say we put a pickaxe in his head and be done with it,” Daryl suggests brusquely.

“So that’s what you’d want if the same thing happened to you?” Kate wants to know.

“Yeah,” Daryl says without hesitation, “and I’d thank you while you did it.”

Kate holds her hands up with her palms out in mock surrender before she puts them on her hips. Daryl frowns at the twist in his gut and makes a frustrated noise that snarls in his throat because he doesn’t want to give a fuck about what she thinks of him, but she’s one of Lucy’s best friends and he knows that he won’t have a shot in hell with her if her friends don’t like him.

 _Wait_ , he thinks, _since when do I even want a shot in hell with her?_

“I hate to say it,” Dale mumbles, “and I never thought I would, but maybe Daryl’s right.”

Rick shakes his head. “Jim’s not a monster, Dale, or some rabid dog,” he says, “he’s sick, a sick man.”

“I…” Dale stutters and fizzles out before he tries to articulate what he meant by what he said again, “I’m not suggesting—”

Andrea nods, a slow descent of her stubborn chin. “If we start down that road,” she murmurs, “where do we draw the line?”

“I think the line’s pretty clear,” Daryl retorts, “zero tolerance for zombies, or them t’ be.”

Amy folds her arms and squares her shoulders. “What if we can get him help?” she asks. “I heard the C. D. C. was working on a cure.”

“I heard that too,” Shane mutters, “heard a lotta things before the world went to hell.”

Rick sighs and tries not to let it sound too exasperated. “What if the C. D. C. is still up and running?” he asks.

Shane rolls his eyes at the idea. “Man,” he says, “that is a stretch right there.”

“Why?” Rick wants to know. “If there’s any government left, any structure at all, they’d protect the C. D. C. at all costs, wouldn’t they? I think it’s our best shot at shelter, protection—”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and gnaws on his bottom lip before he turns to look at Jim, who’s sitting there looking so hopeless that he just wants to put him out of his misery.

Shane huffs. “Okay,” he says, “Rick, you want those things, all right? I do too. Okay? If they exist, they’re at the army base.”

Kate cocks her head to look at him. “Fort Benning?” she asks.

“That’s a hundred miles in the opposite direction,” Lori points out.

“That is right,” Shane bobs his head in a quick nod in answer to both of them before he adds, “but it’s away from the hot zone. Now listen to me. If that place is operational, it’ll be heavily armed. We’d be safe there.”

Rick scowls at the idea. “Shane, the military were on the front lines of this thing,” he says, “and they got overrun. We’ve all seen that.”

“I think the C. D. C. is our best option,” Andrea cuts in, “and it’s Jim’s only chance.”

“Y’all go lookin’ for aspirin,” Daryl mutters before he adjusts his grip on the pickaxe and moves to take a swing at Jim’s head, “do what you need t’ do. Someone needs t’ have the balls t’ take care of this damn problem!”

“Hey!” Rick draws on Daryl before he gets a chance to crack Jim’s skull open and clicks the safety off so the archer knows he means business. “We don’t kill the living,” he says gravely.

Daryl snorts. “That’s funny,” he retorts, “comin’ from a man who just put a gun t’ my head.”

“We may disagree on some things,” Shane murmurs, “not on this.”

“Just put it down,” Glenn says, and it almost seems like he’s begging. “Please.”

Daryl grunts and shoves the pickaxe into the dirt. Shane goes to grab it while Rick takes Jim into the Winnebago.

Andrea sighs. “Lucy was bitten too,” she says.

Amy whirls to look at her sister, wide-eyed. “Andrea!” she whispers, her voice squeaking anxiously on the _uh_ sound.

Rick turns to look at them. “What?” he says.

Daryl is rooted to the spot for a fraction of a second as he tries and fails to process the words _Lucy was bitten_ , and before he knows what he’s doing he’s shouting her name and banging on the door of her trailer like his life depends on it. Cath squawks and clambers to get off the steps before her best friend opens the door. Lucy winces at how bright the sunlight is before she notices that everyone is standing there and looking at her. Daryl in particular looks so heartbroken and horror-struck at the sight of the fresh bite on her forearm that she actually makes the effort to look him in the eyes, wordlessly trying to tell him everything’s going to be okay without saying anything at all.

“I’m not infected,” is what she says as soon as she finds the strength to open her mouth and speak. It’s only three small words, but they could mean something big enough to change the world.

Shane narrows his eyes at her. “Andrea says you were bit,” he says in his interrogation voice. Like he’s trying to catch her in a lie.

Lucy rolls her eyes at him in response. “I didn’t say that I wasn’t bitten,” she tells him sharply. “I said I’m not infected. I’m immune.”

“What?” Glenn blurts out.

Rick gapes at her before he asks, “How is that possible?”

Lucy sighs and shifts her weight off her bad ankle before she props her cane against the edge of the doorframe and holds up her other arm to show everyone the scars from the first bite. “I was bitten six weeks ago by the same zombie that bit my friend Vera,” she informs him, “she died. I didn’t.”

Nico unfolds her arms slowly and skims one of her palms over the grip of the handgun in the holster on her thigh. “I stayed up all night with her,” she elaborates. “I watched Lucy fight the infection, and she won.”

“Why should we believe any of this?” Lori asks quietly. Like she wants to believe it, she just can’t bring herself to hope for anything in this post-apocalyptic hellscape.

“Look at the wound,” Glenn says. “Jim’s still bleeding, but Lucy isn’t.”

Daryl clenches his jaw and swallows hard. “If she were infected, she wouldn’t be healin’,” he points out. “Amy said so herself.”

Lucy smiles at him and his heart stutters viscerally in his chest as she shuffles down the steps of her trailer. “I know if I’m lying, I’m dying,” she deadpans, “but what if I’m not? It’s theoretically possible to use my blood to make a vaccine for this virus. Maybe even a cure.”

It’s the word “cure” that shreds the palpable terror pulsing in the humid air until a fragile edge of hope shines through. After the violence and tragedy of what happened the night before, these people need something—or someone—to believe in.

Apparently that someone is Lucy. Whether she wants them to believe in her or not.


	13. Sawdust in the Blood

**You said I could have anything I wanted, but I**  
**just couldn’t say it out loud.**  
**Actually, you said _love, for you,_**  
**_is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion._**  
**_It’s terrifying. No one_**  
**_will ever want to sleep with you_.**

Richard Siken, “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. II**  
_The Heart’s Desire_  
**Chapter 13**  
Sawdust in the Blood

* * *

_Sunday, 15 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 63._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

It’s Amy’s idea to wrap the bodies in sheets to shroud them as they return to dust. While this isn’t how she had imagined her twenty-fourth birthday, she’s just happy she lived through the night. Andrea gives her a present: a gold pendant shaped like a mermaid that she wears on a chain around her neck as she walks up the hill to the gravesite with her sister’s arm loosely slung over her shoulders.

After the bodies are loaded into the back of his pickup truck, Daryl climbs into the driver’s seat and buckles his seatbelt before Lucy opens the passenger’s side door. When he looks at her, his heart stutters deep in his chest and he swallows hard. It sucks to have such a visceral gut reaction to a woman he knows he can’t have, but things haven’t worked out for him in the past. Why should now be any different?

“Hey,” he mutters, “ya’ need somethin’?”

Lucy sighs and it takes him a second to deduce that she’s embarrassed from the way she hunches her shoulders and gnaws on the inside of her cheek before she answers his question with a question. “I don’t think I can walk up the hill,” she mumbles, “can I ride with you?”

Daryl nods, sharply. Lucy smiles and climbs into the passenger’s seat, crossing her legs and tucking her ankle into the divot behind her knee. Daryl sneaks a glance at her legs, the smattering of freckles on her inner thighs peeking out from under her skirt, the chipped black polish on her toenails. _Crap_ , he thinks, _even her fuckin’ toes are cute_.

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips as Daryl puts one hand on the gearshift and starts backing the truck up the hill. “I didn’t know any of them,” she says, “the people who died. I talk to three people in this camp that I didn’t know pre-apocalypse: you, Glenn, and Sophia, who only likes me for my corgi. I have no idea how to feel right now.”

Daryl shrugs and keeps his eyes on the winding path to the gravesite. After everything that’s happened in the past couple of days, he sure as hell doesn’t know how to feel either. Merle’s gone. These people keep looking at him like he doesn’t belong and Daryl has never wanted to belong anywhere so badly in his entire life. Lucy thinks she’s immune to a plague that’s wiped out most of the world, and if she’s wrong she’s going to die sometime in the next three days. _I have no idea how to feel right now_ doesn’t even begin to cover it.

“I didn’t know any of those people neither,” he tells her softly, “you’re my only friend here.”

Lucy smiles again because the first time she called him a friend he said _I ain’t got friends_ and walked away in a huff. _I can’t believe that was only a month ago_ , she thinks. “Well,” she says out loud, “you’re the first person I’ve bothered into being my friend since I was in kindergarten, so…”

Daryl abruptly brakes and stops the truck on the hilltop before he shakes his head slowly. “Nah,” he says, “y’ain’t no bother.”

Lucy smiles wider and he smiles back, one corner of his lips unfurling subtly. There’s a visceral coil of warmth blooming in his gut that feels out of place on a day full of dead bodies and disease, so Daryl gets out of his truck and slams his door behind him with a clank before he goes to open the door on the passenger’s side for Lucy. Rick and Shane are covered in fresh dirt because they’ve been digging more graves. Jim only dug half a dozen holes, and that’s not enough for twelve corpses. Lucy shuffles over to stand with Cath, Kate, and Nico in solidarity and solemnity.

“I still think it’s a mistake not burnin’ these bodies,” Daryl says, “it’s what we said we’d do, right?” he tears his gaze away from Lucy and glances sidelong at the former sheriff and his deputy, “burn ’em all. Wasn’t that the idea?”

Shane nods. “Yeah,” he says, “at first.”

“Glenn gets all emotional,” Daryl mutters, “says it’s not the thing t’ do, and we just follow him along?” he snorts and shakes his head as Shane frowns at him. “These people need t’ know who the hell’s in charge here,” he snaps back sharply, “what the rules are.”

“There are no rules,” Rick tells him.

“Well,” Lori says flatly, “that’s a problem. We haven’t had one minute to hold onto anything of our old selves. We need time to mourn. We need to bury our dead. It’s what people _do_.”

There’s a moment of palpable silence that suffuses in the humid air until Lucy ducks her head in a nod. “It’s safe to bury infected bodies as long as the people doing the burial take precautions,” she points out, “the World Health Organization has protocols for that. Which is why I made a bleach and water solution that everyone can use for decontamination later.”

Daryl squints at her, scrutinizing. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s get this over with.”

* * *

Kate and Nico brought up water from the quarry and boiled it before Lucy and Cath mixed in the bleach. After the bodies are buried, everyone takes a canister of the 1:10 solution and goes to change out of their filthy clothing. Carol eventually comes back and starts going through the motions of doing laundry because keeping busy is simpler than dwelling on how good it felt to split open her dead husband’s skull with a pickaxe and know he’s not going to hurt her or Sophia ever again. Rick and Shane talk about the C. D. C. in hushed tones with an exhausted Lori before they go to do a sweep of the trails near the campsite. Andrea sits on the roof of the Winnebago to keep watch. Amy stays in the RV with Jim, who’s not getting better. Jacqui cries over him in her tent so loudly that everyone in camp can hear her sobs echoing, like they’re being haunted in broad daylight by someone who hasn’t even kicked the bucket yet.

Daryl goes off into the woods to strip and douse himself in bleach. When he comes back in a clean pair of jeans and a plaid button-down shirt with the sleeves torn off, he finds Lucy sitting on the front step of her trailer and spacing out like she’s got a lot on her mind. “Hey,” he murmurs, “didn’t you tell me those W. H. O. protocols were for Ebola? Ain’t this infection a hell of a lot more contagious?”

Lucy exhales a soft whoosh of air. “Actually, those protocols were for casualties of viral hemorrhagic fever symptomatic of any ribovirus,” she informs him. “Ebola is a ribovirus that has anywhere from a twenty-five percent to ninety percent fatality rate. There are five known strains of Ebola, and those viruses have killed a total of approximately fifteen hundred people since 1976. According to the news reports we saw before the power grid failed, this virus killed half the global population in six months. Which is three and a half billion casualties at least, and that’s a soft number. Atlanta had a population of approximately four hundred and twenty-two thousand people and we’ve seen a hundred survivors at most. I’d say this virus is the smartest infectious disease in the history of the world. It has almost a one hundred percent fatality rate, and as far as I know the only person who’s ever survived being exposed to a live infection is…” she bites her lip and flails one hand at herself awkwardly, “…me.”

Daryl squints at the open wound on her forearm and swallows hard. _Okay_ , he thinks, _this girl’s a damn miracle. I ain’t got a shot in hell with her. There ain’t no way she’d ever want a redneck asshole like me_.

Lucy blinks as the archer walks away without saying another word. After the laundry is done and Rick and Shane have swept the perimeter, everyone gathers around the embers of the campfire from the night before.

Shane crouches with his foot on a log next to the fire pit. “I’ve been thinking about Rick’s plan,” he says. “Now look, there are no…there are no guarantees either way. I’ll be the first one to admit that, but I’ve known this man a long time and I trust his instincts. I say the most important thing here is that we need to stay together, so…” he pauses to sneak a glance at Lori, “…those of you that agree, we leave first thing in the morning. Okay?”

“Okay,” Nico grins at him, “road trip. Should be fun.”

 _Famous last words_ , Lucy thinks.

* * *

_Monday, 16 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 64._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Bellwood Quarry._

* * *

Rick gives handheld C. B. radios to everyone with a car so they can stay in contact while they’re on the road. It’s only ten miles from the quarry to where the C. D. C. is, but they’re not taking any chances. T-Dog leans against the side of his church van with Glenn, Amy, and Andrea waiting for further instructions. Lori and Carl are sitting on the bonnet of a buttermilk yellow 1979 Chevrolet C-10 Scottsdale Fleetside and Carol is standing in front of the passenger side door with Sophia, head held high and jaw set with an edge of strength that she didn’t know she still had.

Shane is holding one of the twelve-gauge shotguns in front of him with a rigid tension rooted in his shoulders. “Okay,” he says, “everybody listen up. Those of you with a C. B., we’re going to be on Channel 40. Let’s keep the chatter down. Okay? Now, if you’ve got a problem—don’t have a C. B., can’t get a signal or anything at all—you’re gonna hit your horn one time and that’ll stop the caravan. Any questions?”

Daryl squeezes his eyes shut and swipes at the dregs of sleep with one hand. Lucy asked to ride in his truck, and he wants to spend time alone with her even though he knows he doesn’t have a shot in hell at getting her to want him the way that he wants her. All he wants to know is how long they’re going to stand around talking about leaving before they can get the hell out of here.

“We’re, uh…” Morales clears his throat awkwardly. “We’re not going.”

“We have family in Birmingham,” Miranda elaborates. “We want to be with our people.”

Shane frowns. “If you go on your own,” he says, “you won’t have anyone to watch your back.”

“We’ll take the chance.” Morales slants his gaze to Rick before he adds, “I’ve gotta do what’s best for my family.”

Daryl scoffs as the former sheriff gives Morales one of the four handguns they’ve got left and a box of ammo. Miranda tearfully says goodbye to Jacqui and Lori. Eliza hugs Sophia and gives her a doll to remember her by while both girls try their hardest not to cry. Rick watches them drive off into the sunrise with a solemn expression on his face.

“Come on,” Shane says tersely. “Let’s go. Let’s move out.”

* * *

_Monday, 16 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 64._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_I-20 Eastbound._

* * *

Daryl sneaks a glance at Lucy as she gnaws on her fingernails without biting through any of them before he flicks his gaze to the rearview mirror and looks back at the road ahead. “What’s your tattoo mean?” he wants to know.

Lucy stops biting her left thumbnail and smiles at him in the shy way she has that makes his heart ache. “ _Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc_ ,” she informs him. “It’s pseudo-Latin. It means ‘we gladly feast on those who would subdue us.’ It’s been scientifically proven that every seven years our flesh is new, because we’ve shed all the old skin cells we’ve made. I got this—my first tattoo—seven years after I was raped…” she bites her lip and smiles wider before she adds, “…because that was the day I finally had a body my rapist has never touched. It’s cheesy, I know.”

When he thinks about her being with somebody who could do something so horrible to her, Daryl sees red. It’s enough to make him grip the steering wheel so hard his knuckles clench white and he exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils in a futile attempt to calm himself down. “Okay,” he says, “I gotta ask. Why’re you still a virgin? I know you said you don’t trust yourself to like anybody, but y’know sex don’t always gotta be about some mushy crap. It can just be about feelin’ good, or blowin’ off steam, or whatever.”

Lucy chortles, a soft noise that floats up like bubbles and pops in the space between them. “I’m not a prude, Daryl. I know I could’ve gotten laid if I’d wanted to. I’m not smoking hot or anything, but I’m smart and cute and funny, and I give a phenomenal blowjob. I could’ve gone to a bar, or made a profile on a dating site, or posted an ad on Craigslist. Virginal Librarian Seeking Guy Who’s Good in Bed for Her No Strings Attached First Time, or something.”

Daryl groans low in his throat because now he can’t stop thinking about Lucy using that pretty mouth of hers on him. _Yeah_ , he thinks. _Dream on, Dixon. Lucy wouldn’t blow you if you were the last guy on earth_. “Okay,” he mutters. “Why didn’t ya’?”

Lucy shrugs and slumps in her seat. “I want sex to mean something more than just feeling good or blowing off steam,” she murmurs in a soft hush like she’s telling him a secret. “I want trust, and intimacy, and respect, and fidelity, and passion, and loyalty. I want true love. I know it exists. Kate and Liam have it, Cath and Toby have it, and my parents had it, and if I die today…” she gnaws on the inside of her cheek before she articulates, “…if I die today my only regret would be that I never got to have it too.”

Daryl snorts. _There ain’t no such thing_ , he thinks.

Famous last words.


	14. Halfway to Hell and Loving It

**Anxiety is your body’s response to perceived danger**  
**and mine is so strong**  
**you would have to call it a superpower.**

 **It never gives up.**  
**It is always looking for a fight.**  
**It is the fiercest part of me.**

Brenna Twohy, “In Which I Do Not Fear Harvey Dent”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. II**  
_The Heart’s Desire_  
**Chapter 14**  
Halfway to Hell and Loving It

* * *

_Monday, 16 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 64._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Briarcliff Road._

* * *

It’s only a ten-mile drive to the C. D. C., but of course the RV breaks down before they get there. Lucy blinks and taps her earpiece to turn it on as Daryl hits the brakes and stops behind T-Dog’s church van. Nico is three cars ahead of them in between the Fleetside and Dale’s RV. If anyone knows what the problem is, she does.

Lucy heaves a sigh. “What the hell went wrong now?” she wants to know.

“RV needs a new radiator hose,” Nico tells her, “but we knew that on Saturday.”

Lucy ducks her head in a nod even though she knows Nico can’t see her and taps her earpiece to turn the radio off. “Daryl,” she says, “you like barbeque chips, right?”

Daryl shrugs and smiles at her in that subtle, crooked way of his. “I like all kinds of chips,” he says. “I ain’t picky. Why?”

Lucy yanks her backpack into her lap and pulls out a map of Atlanta marked with sparkly owl stickers. “I stopped to get some gas around here while my girls and I were driving around the city before they dropped the bombs,” she informs him, “and we had pizza at this place next to a Kroger and a Rite-Aid. It’s a few miles up ahead. I’m not going to waste an opportunity to scavenge food and medical supplies.”

Daryl glances at the crossbow waiting behind his seat. “I’ll come too,” he offers, “keep ya’ safe.”

Lucy adjusts her glasses and shakes her head slowly. “Um,” she bites her lip and ekes the _mmm_ sound out awkwardly, “that’s a bad idea because my girls don’t like you.”

Daryl snorts. “Nobody does,” he mutters.

“I like you,” Lucy informs him, “but you’re not exactly an easy guy to get to know. Which is something you’ve probably been doing on purpose your whole life, because people who can’t get close to you can’t hurt you…”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils as his stomach churns unsettlingly. Lucy has only known him for six weeks, but she can read him like a book. It’s better not to give a shit. It hurts less. It’s a hell of a lot easier than whatever this is—the lump in his throat, the flare deep in his chest, the automatic urge to tell her to fuck off and mind her own business that pales in comparison to his desire to feel her flush against him again. “I like you, too,” he tells her softly.

Lucy smiles at him wide and warm before she gets out of his truck and shuffles up the road slowly but surely. Daryl closes his eyes and hides his face in one hand as his cheeks flush bright red.

 _I like her so damn much_ , he thinks _. What the hell am I gonna do now?_

* * *

_Monday, 16 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 64._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Old Briarcliff Way._

* * *

Lucy stops in front of the Kroger as the doors automatically slide open. There’s a persistent drone in the humid air, background noise that feels strangely familiar to her. Lucy frowns as she shuffles through the doorway.

“It’s the generators,” Nico tells her, “they’re still running.”

Lucy abruptly grabs a grocery cart and tucks her cane in the corner before she goes straight to the organic produce section. “Apples stay on the produce shelves for a year at most,” she mumbles. “Potatoes can last months. Cabbage lasts anywhere from three to six weeks. Onions can last months. Peppers can last a month, tops.”

Kate pushes another cart and catches up with her easily because she’s nine inches taller than her shuffling friend and it’s all in her legs. “What about peaches?” she asks. “Or carrots?”

“Carrots last about a month, five weeks at the most. Peaches last three days at room temperature once they’re ripe,” Lucy informs her as she approaches a towering display of onions, “but I have a brochure of farms that let tourists pick their own fruit near Atlanta if you want to find an orchard later. I think one of them has pecans, too…” she checks the firmness of the onions meticulously and fills a paper bag with globular vegetables, “…I love pecans.”

Cath starts bagging shallots and brussels sprouts while Lucy fills another bag with shiny bell peppers. “Apparently beets don’t have a long shelf life,” she says mournfully.

“It’s about two weeks,” Lucy tells her as she fills yet another paper bag with potatoes, “three at the most.”

Nico stops pushing her cart to throw her knife at a zombie who shambles out of the next aisle. “Want anything from the deli aisle?” she asks as she pulls her knife out of its gaping eye socket.

“Sour cream and sharp cheddar,” Lucy answers. “I’m going to make black bean soup when we get back to the convoy.”

“Pickles,” Cath adds. “Spears, not chips.”

Kate attaches a silencer to the barrel of her P99 and follows Nico on her quest to the deli aisle to watch her back and to find a wedge of smoked gouda. Lucy finds black beans, vegetable broth, and tomato paste in the canned food aisle. Cath grabs a plethora of chips—potato chips, corn chips, tortilla chips—and a smorgasbord of other snacks. Kate meets them in the aisle with all kinds of pasta and laughs as Lucy steals every box of bowtie noodles on the shelf.

“Okay,” Nico says, “we need to talk about you and the redneck.”

Lucy drops some linguine on the floor with a crunch. “What?” she blurts out incredulously before she hunches to pick up the dented box.

Nico folds her arms loosely across her chest and cocks one of her hips in a vaguely threatening way. “Cath said you let him give you a hug and you didn’t have a panic attack,” she points out, “and you’ve been riding in his truck instead of riding with us.”

Lucy huffs. “I didn’t think it would take so long to drive ten miles,” she snarks back. “I was only supposed to be in his truck for half an hour. Merle is gone and Daryl is probably thinking he’s alone now. I wanted to show him that he’s not, that’s all. No one should be alone in this situation. I would’ve spent the last month stagnating in a prolonged depressive episode if I didn’t have you guys to keep me from spiraling.”

Cath shudders because she remembers how Lucy didn’t leave her room for almost a year after they graduated high school, how getting dumped by her first love and losing her best friend since third grade and getting diagnosed with an incurable disease broke her heart into too many pieces. It’s been almost a decade since then and they’ve all outgrown being those girls on the edge of nineteen, but they haven’t grown out of worrying about each other. Which is what friends are for. No matter how old they are.

Nico sighs. “Look,” she says, “this is what you do. Remember the guy who worked at Central Market you only liked because he always had a girlfriend who wasn’t you, or the male nurse with the fiancée he didn’t tell you about, or the twenty-two-year-old dishwasher who knocked up a forty-two-year-old woman? None of those guys would’ve been any good for you.”

Lucy cocks her head owlishly. “Okay,” she says flatly, “you want to go there? Fine. Let’s be honest: we’ve all made big mistakes when it comes to guys. I’ve made the worst ones, but that’s only because my high school boyfriend raped me instead of threatening to kill me with a shiatsu Vulcan death grip…” she glances at Cath before she flicks her gaze to Nico again, “…or trying to push me into sex I wasn’t ready to have and telling our mutual friends that I was a bad girlfriend because I wouldn’t fuck him. Nico, you’ve never had an orgasm and you won’t let your fiancée go down on you because you’re grossed out by your own pussy. Cath dated a jerkoff in college who cheated on her because she was saving herself for marriage and he wanted to get laid. Kate got married—to a redneck, might I add!—when we were twenty and didn’t tell anyone until we were twenty-four.”

Kate shrugs and grins sheepishly. “I have no room to talk,” she says, “my husband’s totally a redneck.”

Cath guffaws and covers her mouth with one hand to muffle the sound. “I still can’t believe you waited four years to tell us you were married,” she wheezes into the space between her fingers.

“I am trying so hard not to have a crush on Daryl because I don’t know him well enough for it to be anything but a coping mechanism,” Lucy mumbles as she dumps more boxes of linguine into her cart, “but I don’t think it would be a mistake to have a crush on him because I do know he’s strong and he has this dry sense of humor and he’d never hurt me…”

“Okay,” Nico says, “if you’re trying not to have a crush on him then you should know it sounds like you’re failing epically.”

Lucy shakes her head slowly and exhales sharply through her nose. “I like Daryl,” she says. “I don’t know if I _like_ him, but I do know you don’t get to tell me how to feel or who I can have feelings for. Nobody does.”

Kate shoots another shambling zombie in the head, silent but deadly. “We’re not trying to tell you what to do or how to feel,” she says. “We just don’t want you to get hurt again.”

“Okay.” Lucy heaves another sigh in a futile attempt to decompress before she abruptly pushes her cart up the aisle. “Let’s just go before more flesh-eating monsters show up.”

* * *

_Monday, 16 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 64._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Briarcliff Road._

* * *

When the girls return to the convoy, Shane and T-Dog are still off scavenging for more gas and a radiator hose for the RV. Lucy makes soup and sits in her trailer alone with the big pot while it simmers on the stove. Daryl knocks on the open doorway and climbs into the trailer with her. “Hey,” he says. “What’re you makin’? It smells good.”

“Yup,” Lucy pops the _p_ sound, “that would be the cumin and chili powder. It’s my mom’s recipe for black bean soup with onions and bell peppers.”

Daryl glances down at the bags of produce on the floor of her trailer, crouches to steal an apple from one of them, and takes a loud chomping bite.

Lucy shakes her head at him indignantly. “I guess that’s not going in the potato apple bake I was going to make later,” she deadpans.

Daryl snorts and leans against the wall of her trailer. “I doubt ya’ need a whole bushel of apples for that,” he points out.

Lucy rolls her eyes at him before she holds up a bag of potato chips. “I need three or four depending on how big the casserole dish is,” she informs him. “Also, these are for you.”

When he smiles at her, her breath hitches in her throat and she has to remember how to inhale. It feels like her heart is being squeezed until she can’t do instinctual things her body was made for, like converting oxygen into carbon dioxide.

 _If you’re trying not to have a crush on him then you should know it sounds like you’re failing epically_ , Nico’s voice echoes in her mind.

 _No_ , she thinks, _this isn’t a crush_. _It’s my trauma. I don’t like him. It’s not real_.

“Hey,” Daryl murmurs. “Where’d you go?”

Lucy sucks in a slow breath and looks up into his eyes. Too blue. Too much. Too soon. Lucy bites her lip and smiles at him shyly. “Nowhere,” she mumbles. Truth be told, she can’t think of anywhere else she’d rather be.

* * *

_Monday, 16 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 64._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Center for Disease Control and Prevention._

* * *

After the RV breaks down in the middle of the highway, Jim wakes up from a feverish dream and he somehow knows that his time has come. When the others give him a chance to decide how he wants his story to end, he chooses to die by the side of the road and become one of the monsters that killed his family. Which is a hopeless choice, but it’s what he wants. Nobody can make that call except him.

It’s dusk by the time the convoy arrives at the C. D. C., a sleek edifice that looms operatically against the darkening sky. There’s a barricade in shambles with abandoned tanks parked in front of the chrome and glass façade of the building and fermenting corpses with flies buzzing around them strewn over the pavement like gruesome confetti. It’s a study in the aftermath of chaos, a disaster area in suspended animation. Lucy covers her mouth with the hand she isn’t using to grip her cane and chokes on bile while she tries not to throw up and make the mess worse. Amy puts a tentative hand on her shoulder and squeezes. Kate draws her P99 and unzips the pocket of her tactical holster where she keeps an extra clip, just in case. Daryl is holding his crossbow in one hand and a twelve-gauge shotgun in the other because he’s not taking any chances. Shane grunts and tries to pull one of the metal shutters up while it creaks in protest.

“There’s nobody here,” T-Dog says.

Rick looks up past the brim of his sheriff’s hat. “Then why are these shutters down?” he wants to know.

Kate winces as Daryl shoots a tall shambling zombie between the eyes. It’s hard to look at dead soldiers without thinking of her husband, who probably died in the bowels of a tank he was operating.

“You led us into a graveyard!” Daryl shouts.

“Hey,” Shane says flatly, “he made a call.”

“It was the wrong damn call!” Daryl retorts.

“Just shut up,” Shane growls. “You hear me?”

“Where are we gonna go?” Carol asks as Sophia chokes back tears in her arms.

“Carol’s right,” Lori interjects. “We can’t be here this close to the city after dark.”

“Fort Benning, Rick,” Shane says, imploring. “Still an option.”

“On what?” Andrea asks incredulously. “We’re almost out of fuel.”

“Fort Benning is over a hundred miles away,” Kate points out.

“Actually,” Glenn blurts out, “it’s a hundred and twenty-five miles. I checked the map.”

Rick shakes his head so fast he almost discombobulates himself. “Forget it,” he says erratically.

“We need answers tonight,” Lori says and bites down on the consonant, “ _now_.”

“We’ll think of something,” Rick says in a futile attempt to calm her down.

Lucy shuffles over to put her ear against the door. It’s the same persistent drone from the grocery store, the sound of a generator running things from behind the scenes. Daryl glances at her over his shoulder and instinctually moves closer to her while he keeps a lookout for more zombies.

“All right,” Shane snaps in a voice that breaks the silence that ensues, “everybody back to the cars. Let’s go.”

“Wait!” Rick shouts desperately, “the camera. It moved.”

“You imagined it,” Dale tells him.

“No.” Rick shakes his head again. “It moved.”

“It’s an automated device,” Shane cuts in urgently. “It’s gears, they’re just winding down. Okay? Look around this place. It’s dead. Okay? It’s dead.”

Rick grits his teeth and his jaw sets in a stubborn line. “I know you’re in there!” he screams. “I know you can hear me. Please! We’re desperate. Please help us! We have women, children…” he stops to gulp in a ragged breath and gasp, “…hardly any gas left. We have nowhere else to go. If you don’t let us in, you’re killing us!”

Lucy heaves a sigh and shuffles back to look up into the cold eye of the camera. “I was first exposed to a live state infection of this virus on July third,” she says and holds up her right arm to show whoever is watching the pink slubs of scar tissue perfectly shaped like teeth, “and I didn’t amplify. I was exposed again on July twelfth and I didn’t even run a fever. I was exposed a third and final time approximately forty-nine hours ago, and I haven’t shown any signs of infection. I know you’ve been looking for a cure for months. I’m sure you’ve been so afraid. Please…” she gnaws on the inside of her cheek as she adjusts her glasses and loosens her grip on the handle of her cane. “Let me show you that all hope isn’t lost.”

There’s a cacophonous shriek from the metal shutter as the gears wind up. When the door opens, bright light blares out to swallow everything but fear. Daryl lowers his rifle and turns to look at her like he’s more struck by her than any of the artificial resplendence blinding the others.

 _Nothing was made before me but eternal things_ , Lucy thinks, _and eternal I endure. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here_.


	15. Let It All Bleed Out

**Four be the things I am wiser to know:**  
**Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.**  
**Four be the things I’d been better without:**  
**Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.**

 **Three be the things I shall never attain:**  
**Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.**  
**Three be the things I shall have till I die:**  
**Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.**

Dorothy Parker, “Inventory”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. II**  
_The Heart’s Desire_  
**Chapter 15**  
Let It All Bleed Out

* * *

_Monday, 16 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 64._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Center for Disease Control and Prevention._

* * *

It’s eerie inside the C. D. C., clean and inhumanly sterile under the incorporeal film of the stark fluorescent lights. Daryl covers the door while the others crowd into the building and fan out: Rick and Shane in the front with their guns drawn, Glenn and T-Dog flanking them on both sides with shotguns at the ready, Lori gripping Carl by the hand, Jacqui hunching her thin shoulders because she hasn’t slept in almost two days and she’s exhausted, Carol with an arm around her daughter and Sophia clutching her ragdoll to her chest, Andrea holding her pistol in one hand and holding onto Amy with the other, Dale clinging to his rifle like he doesn’t want to have to use it, Cath looping a leash around her wrist so Harley—the mutt she rescued—won’t get lost, Nico unsnapping her knife from its sheath because she doesn’t want to waste any bullets if she doesn’t have to, Kate squinting at the shadows as she draws her P99 and settles into a Weaver stance, and Lucy tucking her cane in the crook of her elbow to keep it from making a hollow sound against the floor. Romy scampers in behind her, toenails clattering on the linoleum.

Rick stops and looks around at the emptiness of the entryway. “Hello?” he says, the tremor in his voice reverberating into an echo.

When a man in a gray t-shirt and scrub pants steps out of the shadows with a Colt M4A1 assault rifle, the sound of their guns cocking ricochets through the sterile air. “What do you want?” he asks.

Rick gulps audibly. “A chance,” he says desperately, still trembling.

“That’s asking an awful lot these days,” the doctor quips.

Rick clenches his jaw and swallows hard. “I know,” he says.

After he flicks his gaze to the women and children in the group and sees the looks of exhaustive horror on every face, the doctor exhales a heavy sigh. Which doesn’t go unnoticed by Lucy, who narrows her eyes at him behind her glasses. “You all submit to a blood test,” he says. “That’s the price of admission.”

Rick unclenches his jaw and nods. “We can do that,” he says.

At that, the doctor hunches his shoulders and lowers his M4A1. “If you’ve got stuff to bring in, you do it now,” he says, “because once this door closes, it stays closed.”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek as Daryl, T-Dog, Glenn, Rick, and Shane go back out into the night to unload the cars. _I have a bad feeling about this_ , she thinks. _Why didn’t he open the door until Rick had a meltdown on his doorstep and I spilled the immunity beans? I’m the worst at social cues, but I can tell he doesn’t want us here. Why?_

“Vi,” the doctor says as soon as they’re all crowded into the entryway again, “seal the main entrance and kill the power up here.”

 _Rick thinks we’ve been saved_ , Lucy thinks as she shuffles into the elevator and backs herself into a corner. _What if he’s wrong? What if Daryl’s right, and he’s led us into a graveyard? What if this is how we die?_

Cath shoots her a wide-eyed look, nostrils flared and eyebrows arched, mouth in a thin flat line. Lucy shrugs and scoops her puppy into her arms.

 _I’m not going to die here_ , she thinks. _I can’t. I’m not finished yet_.

“Rick Grimes,” Rick says, introducing himself.

“Dr. Edwin Jenner,” the doctor says.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly. “Jenner?” she narrows her eyes at him skeptically. “Like Dr. Edward Jenner?”

“Who?” Shane asks.

“Edward Jenner invented the world’s first vaccine,” Lucy informs him as she shuffles into the elevator and backs herself into a corner more out of habit than anything else, “he’s the father of modern immunology. _Variolae vaccinae_ was a term he coined for cowpox, and that’s where the word ‘vaccine’ comes from. Edward Jenner discovered that people infected with cowpox were immune to smallpox, and he used the attenuated cowpox virus to create an immunization in 1796 that eventually led to the eradication of smallpox worldwide in 1979.”

Jenner nods. “I’m his last living descendant,” he clarifies, “but I’m not living up to that legacy. I just work here.”

Daryl snorts and instinctually moves to stand next to Lucy, who’s muffling a yawn in the hollow of one palm. There are enough people in the elevator to give him an excuse to get close to her, so close he can smell the bite of sweetness in the shampoo that she uses. Nobody in a post-apocalyptic wasteland should smell so good. Daryl shifts his focus and squints at Jenner suspiciously. “Doctors always go around packin’ heat like that?” he wants to know. Ironically, the archer has a semiautomatic 9mm pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants, he’s holding his crossbow in one hand, and he’s carrying a pump-action shotgun in the other. If anyone in the elevator is packing heat, it’s him; he’s armed to the teeth.

“There were plenty left lying around,” Jenner says. “I familiarized myself, but you look harmless enough,” he gives Carl a conspiratorial smile before he adds, “except you. I’ll have to keep my eye on you.”

After that, Jenner leads them out of the elevator and down a brightly lit hallway into a control room. Carol frown at the twist of nausea in her stomach, her claustrophobia making the white sterile walls loom ominously.

“Vi,” Jenner says, “bring up the lights in here.”

Lucy shuffles down the ramp and flops into a chair behind a bulky desktop computer with a screen that shines black and lifeless. There’s a ring of artificial light hanging from the dark ceiling above the ascendant consoles. Romy scampers around as she looks at the digital clock on the wall counting down in blaring red. _Sixteen hours and twenty-one minutes_ , Lucy thinks. _Sixteen hours and twenty-one minutes until what?_

“Welcome to Zone 5,” Jenner says before he walks into the center of the ring, the last man standing.

“Where is everybody?” Rick asks, “the other doctors, the staff?”

“I’m it,” Jenner tells him sadly, “it’s just me here.”

“What about the person you were speaking with?” Lori asks. “Vi?”

Vi greets and welcomes them in a disembodied robotic voice as comprehension dawns. It’s a computer program, a Cartesian ghost in the machine, not a real woman.

“I’m all that’s left,” Jenner says. “I’m sorry.”

* * *

After he leads them into a lab with a whiteboard full of incomprehensible scribbles on the wall, Jenner draws their blood meticulously and fills a rack with vials.

“What’s the point?” Andrea wants to know. “If anyone here was infected, they’d be running a fever.”

“I’ve already broken every rule in the book letting you in here,” Jenner says instead of answering her question. “Let me just at least be thorough.”

Lucy adjusts her glasses and forces herself to look the doctor in the eyes. “Dr. Jenner is checking for a latent viral infection,” she murmurs, “aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Jenner tells her solemnly, “before the disease went global we had identified one strain of the virus that was in the water supply. Human Zombification Virus A. It spread first as a waterborne pathogen and through biting like rabies, but we had reports from other researchers that a latent infection could also be sexually transmitted. Approximately sixty-four days ago a new strain of the virus was identified, an airborne pathogen that killed half the world’s population in two weeks and kept spreading. It’s my hypothesis that persistent exposure to the waterborne HZV-A viral symbionts over a certain amount of time keeps the virus in a state of mutualistic symbiosis in our systems until brain death, making carriers partially immune to the airborne HZV-B pathogen that causes spontaneous viral amplification. There are no viral symbionts in your blood,” he looks up from his microscope with a look of dubious awe on his face, “you’re actively, naturally, totally immune to both known strains of this disease.”

When he says it out loud, it feels like he knocked the air out of everyone else in the room. Lori gasps and covers her mouth to muffle the sound. Amy bursts into tears and tries to hug Lucy, who’s gnawing on the inside of her cheek to stop herself from saying _I told you so_. Rick smiles and nods at her like he never doubted her, even though she knows better. Lucy knows they’ve all spent the past six weeks trying and failing to hold onto hope, and she’s not going to hold any doubts they had about her immunity against them.

Life is too short.

* * *

When dinner is served, the dining hall at the C. D. C. fills with raucous laughter that blooms in spite of the gloom and doom of being underground and in the dark. There’s a ginormous bowl of spaghetti, bottles of red wine and expensive liqueur, and they can pretend the world hasn’t gone to hell in a handbasket. Almost.

Daryl stands apart from the group with a bottle of Southern Comfort instead of taking a seat at the table. Lucy side-eyes Jenner while she eats her noodles, spooling them around the tines of her fork. There’s a wedding band on his ring finger, so he’s probably a widower. Which explains why he looks so overwhelmingly sad, a study in stark contrast to the celebration going on around him. Cath, Kate and Nico are talking to Andrea, Amy, and Jacqui. Dale pours a glass of wine for Carl, who sips it and scrunches up his face in disgust at the bitter taste.

“That’s my boy,” Lori says proudly.

Shane chuckles. “Just stick to soda pop there, bud,” he says.

Rick slants his gaze to Jenner and clears his throat. “It seems to me we haven’t thanked our host properly,” he says.

“He’s more than just our host,” T-Dog interjects. “He saved our lives.”

Glenn nods. “Here’s to you, doc,” he says.

Daryl whoops and raises the bottle in his hand. “Booyah!” he shouts.

Lucy bites her lip and tries not to smile. _Okay_ , she thinks, _him getting drunk off his ass shouldn’t be cute. What the hell is wrong with me?_

“So,” Shane mutters as soon as the echoes of _Booyah!_ fade out, “when are you gonna tell us what the hell happened here, doc? All the other doctors that were supposed to be figuring out what happened, where are they?”

Rick heaves a sigh and breaks the silence that ensues. “We’re celebrating, Shane,” he says warningly. “We don’t need to do this now.”

Shane frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing. “Wait a second,” he retorts. “This is why we’re here, right? This was your move. We were supposed to find answers. Instead we found him, found one man. Why?”

“Well,” Jenner says, “when things got bad, a lot of people just…left…went off to be with their families, and when things got worse—when the military cordon got overrun—the rest bolted.”

“Every last one?” Shane drawls skeptically.

“No,” Jenner tells him solemnly, “many couldn’t face walking out the door. They…opted out. There was a rash of suicides. That was a bad time.”

“You didn’t leave,” Jacqui murmurs. “Why?”

Jenner swallows hard. “I just kept working,” he says, “hoping to do some good.”

Lucy sips her soda and narrows her eyes at him. _Dr. Jenner doesn’t look hopeful_ , she thinks, _he looks like he wants to die_.


	16. Death and Destiny Inside the Dream Factory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : Daryl takes a shower and jerks off in this chapter. It’s not a particularly graphic or explicit scene and this fic is rated M for a reason, but I’m still telling y’all just in case that’s not your jam. Beware.

**There comes a point when you need to get over the fear and get on with your life, and a lot of people don’t seem to be capable of that anymore.**

Mira Grant, _Feed_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. II**  
_The Heart’s Desire_  
**Chapter 16**  
Death and Destiny Inside the Dream Factory

* * *

_Monday, 16 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 64._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Center for Disease Control and Prevention._

* * *

After dinner, Lucy waits in the hallway while everybody else is squirreled away in their underground rooms. Jenner says that most of the facility is powered down, and that means the generators must be running out of fuel. There’s no way this is a permanent solution to their problems. After all, it literally comes with a ticking clock.

Cath gives her a questioning look. “What’s wrong?” she wants to know.

Lucy shrugs. “I’m sure he has a working MRI machine around here somewhere,” she says, “and I got a concussion two days ago, remember? I need a brain scan.”

Cath folds her arms. “I remember you telling me that it takes an hour to get a MRI,” she says, “and I don’t think you should be alone with the borderline suicidal doctor for an hour.”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek as she thumbs an old scar on the inside of her left wrist. While it’s small enough that nobody could tell she attempted suicide by looking at the slub of scar tissue, it’s living proof that she knows how it feels to want to die. If anyone knows what hopelessness looks like, it’s her.

Daryl clears his throat. “I can go with her,” he offers, “my crossbow’s quicker ’n your needles or a knife. Wouldn’t be wastin’ no bullets, neither.”

Cath scowls at him because she knows he’s right. “Okay,” she says, “just don’t let anything bad happen to her.”

Daryl nods, a sharp descent of his chin. Lucy smiles at him shyly before she goes to talk to a man about a brain scan. Then, as soon as they’re in the exam room next to the real-time MRI machine, she pulls a gun on the doctor and shifts her weight onto her cane as she aims her revolver at the center of his chest. Daryl squints at her as she puts her finger on the trigger of her .38 special, but he doesn’t hesitate before he aims his crossbow at the other man’s throat because he trusts her enough to follow her lead.

“I want the security code to the front door,” she informs the doctor in a ferociously soft voice, “and override codes for voice recognition and decontamination protocol. I can see you want to die. I’m sure that’s what stopped you from opening the door at first. Maybe you changed your mind because you thought it would be kind to give us warm beds and a last meal. Maybe you don’t want to die alone. Maybe you want to tell someone what you know about this disease before you opt out, but guess what?” she extracts her listography notebook from the right-hand pocket of her skirt and holds it out to him. “I don’t give a crap about what you want. I’m not going to die here.”

Jenner takes the notebook from her with a mournful smile. “It would be a waste to let you die here,” he murmurs. “I was planning to give you a portable hard drive with all of the information I have on this virus. I assume you have access to a computer?”

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “I have my laptop,” she clarifies, “and a solar-powered trailer with outlets that I’ve been using to keep the battery fully charged. If you give me a microscope, I should be able to use your research and my blood to make a cure and you can go gently into that good night.”

Jenner exhales a quiet gust of laughter. “While you rage, rage against the dying of the light?” he quips.

Daryl glances at Lucy, who’s rolling her eyes. “I want those security codes,” she says, “now.”

Jenner flips her notebook open to a blank page and grabs a pen to write down the information she asked for. “Here,” he says.

Lucy holsters her revolver before she puts her notebook back in her pocket. “Okay,” she says, “about that MRI. I wasn’t lying. I do have a concussion and I won’t be able to cure the most infectious disease in the history of the world if I die of a cerebral hemorrhage, so can we check my brain for bleeding now? Please?”

Jenner looks at Daryl, who lowers his crossbow. “Yes,” he says, “of course.”

Daryl shoots the doctor a warning look while Lucy takes off her earrings, her shoes, her bra, her skirt, and her glasses. It’s a pretty bra, black silk cups festooned with tiny white polka-dots and edged in frothy off-white lace. Daryl is trying not to imagine her riding him in nothing but that bra with the cups pulled down while he licks and bites her nipples when the real-time image of her brain appears on the computer screen. Lucy thinking is like falling stars, radiant beams of light flaring in the brilliant abyss of her mind.

“Look at her synapses firing,” Jenner murmurs, “her brain is extraordinary. Beautiful.”

Daryl swallows hard and exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, she is.”

“I lost my wife to this disease,” Jenner tells him with a quiet edge of all-consuming grief in his voice, “she begged me with her last breath to find a cure. I should feel inspired, I should feel hopeful, but Candace is gone. I don’t want to live without her anymore.” At that, he looks up from the image on the screen and smiles at Daryl knowingly. “I think you know how that feels.”

Lucy falls asleep during the scan and takes a nap while they watch her neurons spark and shimmer. There’s no bleeding in her brain, no cerebral hemorrhaging, no permanent damage. Jenner gives her the portable hard drive with all of the information about the virus and she tests the access codes that he wrote in her notebook by walking out the front door. Daryl spends most of the night helping her scavenge medical supplies and military grade artillery from the upper levels of the C. D. C. and loading it all into the back of T-Dog’s church van: grenades, assault rifles, bullets, shell casings, blood collection kits, gauze, surgical gloves, bandages, alcohol swabs, a portable ultrasound and a portable X-ray machine, all of the nonperishable food in the kitchen and every can of Dr. Pepper from the soda machine.

“Why’d you wait?” he asks her once they’re back inside the entryway waiting for the elevator. “I know you knew somethin’ was wrong the minute you saw that clock. Why didn’t you tell everybody what was goin’ on?”

Lucy shrugs as she sliding doors open. “I wanted everyone to have one night,” she murmurs, “one night of celebrating, one night of feeling safe, one night of not being afraid. I’m going to ask them to make a choice tomorrow before that countdown gets to zero, to choose between dying here and fighting to stay alive out there. I have to ask them to live with fear, and that sucks. I’ve been afraid my whole life. I’m twenty-seven years old and I’ve never been on a date. I spent the last six years in school. I didn’t make friends. I didn’t get close to anyone. I didn’t go anywhere. I kept waiting for my life to start, y’know?” she bites her lip and stuffs her hands in the pockets of her skirt. “I thought if I just got through school, got my degree, got a job as a special collections librarian, things would just…” she flails the hand she isn’t using to grip the handle of her cane in a futile attempt to articulate by gesticulating, “…happen. I’d fall in love. I’d get married. I’d buy a house. I’d have four corgis and name them after the horsemen of the apocalypse. I’d live happily ever after.”

Daryl snorts at the idea of naming four corgis War, Death, Famine, and Conquest, but he can’t help thinking her idea of happily ever after doesn’t sound so bad. “It ain’t over yet,” he tells her softly. “We still got time.”

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound as she shuffles out of the elevator, “nine hours and forty-two minutes. Approximately.”

Daryl thinks about kissing her hard, kissing her soft, kissing her deep, thinks about spending the rest of the night showing her just how good he can be. Instead he grits his teeth around a frustrated noise and stops in front of the room he staked out. “I’m gonna take a shower,” he says brusquely, “see ya’ in the mornin’.”

Lucy chews on her thumbnail without biting through it as he shuts the door behind him with enough force to make her flinch. “Okay,” she mumbles to the empty hallway. “Goodnight.”

* * *

There’s still hot water left by the time Daryl gets in the shower. Shane took his bottle of Southern Comfort when he wasn’t looking, so he’s sobered up and he’s not exactly thrilled about that. Daryl can hold his liquor and he likes drinking alone, the feeling of being comfortably numb, but he likes the way she makes him feel even more. It’s uncomfortable, but he doesn’t give a shit. Lucy makes him feel better than any drug, better than the time he and Merle went gator hunting and he brought down a fifteen-footer, better than staying in his comfort zone.

 _I’m not a prude, Daryl. I give a phenomenal blowjob_.

It’s sexy as hell to imagine her on her knees in the shower with him, her voluptuous body slick with hot water and steam fogging up her glasses while she licks his blunt tip. Daryl groans low in his throat and fists one hand around his dick. It doesn’t make sense to fantasize about her wearing her glasses in the shower, but fantasies don’t have to make sense and he thinks her glasses are cute.

_I don’t trust myself to like anyone._

Daryl closes his eyes and thinks about her rubbing the sensitive ridge on the head of him with the soft pad of her thumb and sucking on his balls. Lucy would be sweet, he just knows it—she’d moan and look at him with those intelligent eyes of hers while he fucked her pretty mouth.

 _I like you_.

Thinking about her blowing him while he jerks himself off quick and dirty is enough to make him come so hard his knees go weak. Daryl slumps to rest his forehead on the slick tile of the shower wall, his dick twitching and going soft against his thigh as thick spurts of his semen trickle down the drain.

 _I want sex to mean something more than just feeling good or blowing off steam._ _I want trust, and intimacy, and respect, and fidelity, and passion, and loyalty_. _I want true love_.

Daryl respects the hell out of Lucy, he feels more loyal to her than he does to Rick or Shane or anybody else, and he trusted her enough to tell her things he’s never told anyone. Not even Merle. Daryl loves his brother, and he knows Merle loves him, but Daryl stopped trusting him the day he left him alone with their father. Merle never bothered to fix what he broke when he walked out; he just showed up out of the blue years later and took Daryl for granted until something better came along.

 _I’d fall in love. I’d get married. I’d buy a house. I’d live happily ever after_.

Lucy is nothing like Merle, nothing like anybody else he’s ever known. Blunt. Smart. Tough. Brave. Sweet. Lucy makes him want to believe in shit like miracles and fairytales and true love. Hell, he’s been half in love with her since the moment he laid eyes on her. It wasn’t love at first sight. It’s not a damn fairytale. It was just him being in the right place at the right time for once in his life.

 _I don’t want to live without her anymore_ , Jenner had said. _I think you know how that feels_.

 _Yeah_ , Daryl thinks. _Yeah, I do_.

Question is, what the hell is he supposed to do about it?


	17. Cease to Exist

**All I ever really want to know is how**  
**other people are making it through life—**  
**where do they put their body, hour by hour,**  
**and how do they cope inside of it?**

Miranda July, “It Chooses You”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. II**  
_The Heart’s Desire_  
**Chapter 17**  
Cease to Exist

* * *

_Tuesday, 17 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 65._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Center for Disease Control and Prevention._

* * *

Lucy spends the rest of the night experimenting with the blood samples that Jenner collected from the others. There’s only enough time to expose the latent viral symbionts in those samples to a few drops of her blood. Which isn’t an exact science, because the blood on the glass slides under her microscope won’t necessarily respond to her antibodies like blood that’s still circulating in the body would. On the bright side, watching her white blood cells destroy the latent viral infection is nothing short of miraculous. On the darker side, the latent infection isn’t the strain of the virus she needs to cure. Lucy has no way of knowing if her white blood cells are capable of destroying the live state infection without exposing someone who’s been injected with her blood to that strain of the virus and risking their life for science.

 _It’s too much to ask_ , she thinks.  _I’m just going to have to inject everyone with my blood and wait for someone to get bitten. Which is a total crapshoot, but at least I won’t be throwing anyone to the wolves. Or the zombies_.

Cath knocks on the door of her room and Lucy knows it’s her because she knocks timidly at first, then louder and more surely. Almost like she’s testing the proverbial waters.

Lucy muffles a yawn in the hollow of her palm. “I’m awake,” she ekes the _way_ out into another yawn before she adds, “unfortunately.”

Cath opens the door and looks her over as Kate follows her into the room and Nico closes the door behind them. “You’ve been up all night,” she says matter-of-factly.

Lucy shrugs instead of trying to deny it. Cath isn’t accusing her or judging her, she just knows her too well. “I’ve never been diurnal,” she points out. “I stay up all night and then I sleep during the day when people leave me alone instead of trying to make me get up and do things.”

“True.” Kate smiles wide and enunciates the _u_ sound to stretch the word out into two distinct syllables. “I lived with you, so I would know.”

Lucy rolls her eyes at her friend. Kate lived in the guest room at her parents’ house for a few months while her husband was training as a tank operator because they didn’t have their own place yet and she didn’t want to live in a crap shack with her redneck in-laws. It was nice to have Kate around, to the point that Lucy’s parents didn’t want her to leave.

Nico looks into the microscope and squints at the blood devoid of the virus. “I know you took notes,” she murmurs, “let me see them.”

Lucy ducks her head and nods before she hands over a composition notebook with honeycomb and bees on the cover, a larger permutation of her pocket-sized listography notebook. Nico scans the list of names on the first page and grins at the neon smiley face stickers in yellow, pink, and orange next to all of them. _Phase One_ is written in the right-hand corner at the top of the page.

“What’s Phase One?” Nico wants to know.

“Phase One is the experiment I did last night,” Lucy informs her, “introducing my blood to the latent viral symbionts in the samples of everyone else’s blood to see if I could destroy the infection.”

“Which you did,” Nico deduces. “Hence the smileys.”

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound, “but that doesn’t prove anything. There’s a big difference between a blood sample under a microscope and blood that circulates through your whole body. Phase Two is going to take some time to get results. I’m going to talk to everyone about what I want to do at breakfast,” she bites her lip and sighs, “but first I need to tell you guys something. Actually, two things.”

“What’s wrong?” Cath asks.

“Nothing.” Lucy shakes her head slowly. “I asked Dr. Jenner to run an ESR test for me last night to check my blood for inflammatory sediment, because if the rate is above a certain level then I can’t give blood and this experiment isn’t going to work. I asked him to run a RF test because the rate was lower than it’s been since before I was diagnosed with RA and…” she smiles with an edge of incredulity because she can’t believe what she’s about to say is true, “…I’m in remission.”

Apparently, the bright side of getting stuck over three thousand miles away from home in the zombie apocalypse is that going from precipitous Washington to peachy-keen Georgia was enough of a shock to her system to make her go into spontaneous remission. It’s something that happened to her Aunt Annie when she moved from the cornfields of Iowa to a city in California, but Lucy didn’t think the same thing was ever going to happen to her. Being dead wrong has never felt so good.

“Holy crap,” Nico says.

“I’m still crippled,” Lucy clarifies. “There’s no way to reverse the damage the RA has already caused. I’m never getting back any of the functionality that I’ve lost, but I don’t have to take immunosuppressants anymore.”

“Well,” Kate ekes the _l_ sound out with a flick of her tongue against her teeth, “that’s good, since you ran out of injections a month ago.”

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “I was seriously worried about my disease progressing to the point that I wouldn’t be able to walk at all,” she mumbles, “now I don’t have to freak out every time I have a bad leg day.”

Cath smiles, with teeth. “Okay,” she says, “that’s your good news. What’s your bad news?”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek anxiously before she answers: “We have approximately three hours until this building explodes.”

* * *

When the girls finally meet the others in the dining hall, their bags are packed and their dogs are leashed. There’s a bottle of aspirin on the table for those poor unfortunate souls who drank too much the night before and breakfast foods like bacon, scrambled eggs, and cereal in bowls and on plates. Glenn is hunched over in his seat and groaning while Jacqui rubs his back soothingly with the heel of one hand and gives his shoulder a gentle squeeze with the other.

“Don’t ever, ever, ever let me drink again…” he groans.

Lucy catches herself looking for Daryl and frowns until the space between her eyebrows becomes a petulant wrinkle. _Nico was right_ , she thinks. _I have a crush on him, and I’m not fooling anyone. I’m not even fooling myself anymore_.

Shane abruptly walks in with a scowl that he hides and lurid scratch marks on his neck. “Hey,” he says roughly before he goes to get himself some breakfast.

“Hey,” Rick smiles at him even though his back is turned, “you feel as bad as I do?”

Shane clenches his jaw and forces himself to smile. “Worse,” he says.

Lucy adjusts her glasses and glances from the scratches to Lori, who’s hunkered down and staring at her plate like she’s trying to pull a Charlie McGee and burn her bacon with the power of her mind. Whatever is going on between them isn’t her problem, but if anyone knows what the aftermath of being sexually assaulted looks like, it’s her. Lori must have dropped him like a hot potato after her husband came back from the dead and Shane is having a hard time letting go.

“What the hell happened to your neck?” T-Dog asks as Shane goes to take a seat across from Rick.

Shane puts his plate on the table and shrugs. “I must’ve done it in my sleep,” he answers.

Rick narrows his eyes at the other man. “Never seen you do that before,” he says dubiously.

“Yeah…” Shane flicks his gaze to Lori and sips his coffee to hide his disappointment after she looks away, “…me neither. Not like me at all.”

Daryl slowly walks into the dining hall and winces because the brightness of the fluorescent lights makes his whole head throb with sharp pain. After his shower, he tracked down that bottle of Southern Comfort because he hoped that getting drunk out of his mind would make him stop thinking about Lucy’s polka-dot bra or Merle’s sawed-off hand. Turns out not even whiskey dick could get her out of his head, so now he feels like his skull is going to split open and he can’t look her in the eye because he jerked off to her before he got shitfaced drunk and passed out. Doesn’t stop him from stealing a glance at her as she puts the bottle of aspirin in front of him, though. Lucy is cute even with frazzled hair and bags under her eyes. Daryl squeezes his eyes shut, grits his teeth around a groan, and dry swallows two pills. When he opens his eyes, he squints at Lucy and sees her anxiously biting her fingernails to the quick.

Jenner makes his entrance before she has a chance to speak up about her experiment or their imminent doom. “Morning,” he says, his tone lackluster.

“Hey, doc,” Dale says apologetically, “I don’t mean to slam you with questions first thing—”

Jenner pours himself a cup of coffee and snorts. “No,” he murmurs, “but you will anyway.”

Andrea nods. “We didn’t come here for the eggs,” she quips.

Jenner sighs and drinks his coffee down to the last bitter drop before he leaves the room. Andrea makes an indignant noise as the doctor walks out. Amy shrugs at his abrupt exit and smiles at her sister. Andrea can’t help smiling back. It might as well be contagious.

Dale grins at them, wide and warm. “Shall we?” he asks.

Lucy slings her backpack over her shoulder and shuffles through the shadows into the control room as Jenner gives Vi the order to illuminate the eerie halo of light. Romy whines until she picks her up and flops into a chair with the puppy in her arms. Daryl goes to stand next to her with his arms folded in a way that makes the lean muscles of his biceps flex and looks at her over his shoulder as Jenner types something into one of the computers.

“Give me playback of TS-19,” the doctor says.

“Generating playback of TS-19,” the disembodied artificial voice echoes.

“I should warn you that few people ever got a chance to see this,” Jenner explains solemnly as recordings of a real-time MRI appears on the screen of the video wall facing the computers, “very few.”

“Whoa,” Carl blurts out, “is that a brain?”

Jenner nods, sadly. “Yes,” he says, “an extraordinary one. Not that it matters in the end. Vi, take us in for E. I. V.”

“Loading enhanced internal view,” Vi says.

Lucy doesn’t believe in God. If she believes in anything, she believes in the power of the human mind. It’s where stories are told, where the gods come from, where the monsters are born. This is the closest thing she’s ever had to a religious experience. It makes something deep in her chest squeeze tight, like she’s looking at a flesh and blood miracle. Which is exactly how Daryl has been looking at her. If only she weren’t too oblivious and traumatized to notice.

“What are those lights?” Shane wants to know.

“They’re synapses,” Jenner tells him, “electric impulses in the brain that carry all the messages. It’s a person’s life experiences, memories. Somewhere in all that organic wiring, all those ripples of light, is you—the thing that makes you unique, and human. It’s everything. They determine everything a person says, or does, or thinks from the moment of birth to the moment of death.”

Rick walks over to get a closer look at the screen. “So that’s what this is,” he says dubiously, “a vigil?”

“Yes,” Jenner says mournfully, “or…or rather the playback of the vigil.”

Amy is watching the flutters of ignition and flickers of cognition in morbid fascination while Andrea turns to look at the doctor. “This person died,” she murmurs. “Who?”

“Test Subject Nineteen,” Jenner tells her, “someone who was bitten, and infected, and volunteered to have us record the process.”

Lucy cocks her head owlishly and flicks her gaze to the clock on the wall before she shifts her focus back to the screen. _Two hours and eight minutes left_ , she thinks. _Time is running out_.

“Vi.” Jenner swallows thickly. “Scan forward to the first event.”

“Scanning to first event,” Vi echoes.

Darkness takes root in the brain and branches out like vines, shadows twisting into spindles. There are a lot of numbers in the file denoting how this recording was archived, but that isn’t the information that matters. What matters is the fine print. _Test Subject 19: F, 34, CJ_. There was a name on the research that Jenner gave her, and it wasn’t Edwin—it was Candace. Dr. Candace Jenner, the immunologist who discovered the HZV-A waterborne pathogen a hundred and ninety-five days ago.

“What is that?” Glenn asks, his voice pitching awkwardly higher.

“It’s the virus,” Lucy murmurs, “the live infection.”

“It invades the brain like meningitis,” Jenner explains, “the adrenal glands hemorrhage, the brain goes into shutdown. Then all the major organs.” At that, he sucks in a sharp breath as the lights go out. “Then death,” he adds solemnly, “everything you ever were or ever will be. Gone.”

Sophia looks at her mother, wide-eyed and horrified. “Is that what happened to Jim?” she asks.

Carol nods, mourning the loss of the innocence she’s been trying to protect ever since her daughter was born. “Yes,” she answers hollowly.

Jacqui sheds her tears without sobbing because she’s too exhausted for a public display of grief. Jenner still notices the heavy sorrow that seeps into the sterile air. “I lost somebody too,” he tells her softly. “I know how devastating it is.” Then he squares his shoulders and turns back to the video wall. “Scan to second event,” he orders.

“Scanning to second event,” Vi says.

 _Candace Jenner was only six years older than I am_ , Lucy thinks, _the youngest Director for Science in the history of the C. D. C. and a woman to boot. Dr. Jenner was eleven years older than her, but he loved her and she loved him back and then she died. Worse, he had to watch it happen for science and then he spent months failing to cure the disease that killed her while the world around him fell apart. Of course he wants to die. No one should have to live with that_.

“Resurrection times vary wildly,” Jenner says gravely, “we had reports of it happening in as little as three minutes, while the longest we heard of was eight hours, but in the case of this patient it was two hours, one minute, seven seconds.”

Lori frowns as sparks of red flare in the crepuscular void, a moment of twilight between life and undeath. “It restarts the brain?” she says.

“No,” Jenner tells her, “just the brain stem. Basically, the virus gets them up and moving.”

Rick flicks his gaze to Lori before he steps even closer to the video wall. “But they’re not alive,” he says.

Jenner hunches one shoulder into a lopsided shrug and flails his hand at the screen. “You tell me,” he retorts.

Rick shakes his head slowly. “It’s nothing like before,” he says, “most of that brain is dark.”

“Dark. Lifeless. Dead,” Jenner clarifies, “the frontal lobe, the neocortex, the human part, that doesn’t come back…the _you_ part. This is just a host, a shell driven by mindless instinct.”

Lucy shuts her eyes as soon as the barrel of a gun edges into the recording. Daryl unfolds his arms to put a hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently, skimming the rough pad of his thumb over the soft hyperbola where her shoulder meets her upper arm. Lucy covers his fingers with her palm and holds onto him like she doesn’t want to let go.

“God,” Carol says as the gunshot floats into silence and the recording ends. “What was that?”

“Dr. Jenner shot his patient in the head,” Amy says, her voice flat and sharp like a knife, “didn’t you?”

Jenner walks away instead of answering her question. “Vi,” he says. “Power down the main screen and the workstations.”

“Powering down main screen and workstations,” Vi echoes.

Nico shakes her head so fast she almost discombobulates herself. “There must be somebody,” she says, “somewhere. There has to be.”

Jenner stops in the space between the bulky rows of computers. “I lost contact with the other C. D. C. and W. H. O. facilities thirty-one days ago,” he tells her, “everything went down. Communications. Directives. All of it. I’ve been in the dark for a month.”

“So it’s not just here,” Andrea says. “There’s nothing left anywhere.”

Jenner falls silent. It’s the only answer he has. Jacqui shuts her eyes and slumps back against one of the workstations. “Jesus,” she whispers.

Daryl squeezes his eyes shut and swipes at his face with the heel of the hand that Lucy isn’t holding. “I’m gonna get shitfaced drunk,” he mutters, “again.”

“Dr. Jenner,” Dale cuts in, “I know this has been taxing for you and I hate to ask one more question, but—” he jabs his finger at the ominous chronograph and everyone turns to see what he pointed out, “—that clock. It’s counting down. What happens at zero?”

“Well,” Jenner murmurs, “the basement generators run out of fuel.”

There’s an hour and fifty-nine minutes left. Time is running out.

“Vi.” Lucy bites her lip and opens her eyes. “What happens after that?”

“When the generators run out of fuel,” Vi says as Jenner walks out of the control room, “facility-wide decontamination will occur.”


	18. Future Shock

**Without elimination, both a new world**  
**and the old made explicit, understood**  
**in the completion of its partial ecstasy,**  
**the resolution of its partial horror.**

T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. II**  
_The Heart’s Desire_  
**Chapter 18**  
Future Shock

* * *

_Tuesday, 17 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 65._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Center for Disease Control and Prevention._

* * *

After the doctor walks out, panic sets in. Cath side-eyes the redneck as she moves to sit in the chair next to Lucy. Daryl crouches down to pet Harley and scratch his ears. When the mutt licks his forearm, one corner of his mouth unfurls into a crooked smile. Cath pouts because she doesn’t want to think of him as anything other than a greaser with anger issues, but her dog is giving him kisses and that means he can’t be all bad.

Kate drops her duffle bag on the floor next to one of the workstations and folds herself into the seat on the other side of the aisle. Nico stays on her feet and puts her backpack in the empty seat beside her. Amy slumps into another chair with her elbows on her knees, her shoulders hunched, her chin in her hands. Andrea tilts her head back and heaves a sigh that echoes in the eerie room. Dale keeps looking at the ticking clock on the wall every few seconds like he thinks it might tick backwards. Jacqui leans back on her elbows and shuts her eyes because the dregs of her tears are clumping in her lashes. T-Dog hunkers down in the chair behind her and steals a glance at her when he thinks she isn’t looking. Carol stares at the halo of artificial light hanging above them while Sophia ducks her head and tries not to burst into tears.

Glenn crumples his baseball cap up with his fists and groans to break the silence. “Okay,” he says, “decontamination. What did Vi mean by that?”

“I don’t like the way Jenner clammed up,” Shane grumbles, “the way he just wandered off like that.”

“What’s wrong with him?” T-Dog wonders. “Seriously, is he nuts? Medicated? What?”

Lucy huffs. “Dr. Jenner is depressed,” she says and bites down on the consonant before she adds, “he’s been trying and failing to find a cure for this disease for months while everyone around him gave up and ‘opted out’—” she crooks her fingers like quotation marks around the words, “—you would be depressed too, if that happened to you.”

Rick turns to look at her. “You came to breakfast with your bags packed,” he says. “You know something you’re not telling us.”

Lucy shrugs, one of her shoulders hunching to meet her earlobe as she gnaws on her left thumbnail without biting through it. “After they identified the latent viral strain a hundred and ninety-five days ago, the C. D. C. declared Wildfire,” she informs him, “a state of emergency that came with a set of doomsday protocols designed to deploy thermobaric explosive devices in the event of a total system failure. Those protocols were implemented at every C. D. C. facility in the country before the disease went global, including this one. It was on the news.”

Lori glares, her brown eyes fierce and frightened. “You knew we couldn’t stay here for more than one night,” she accuses. “You let us think we had a chance. You gave us false hope—”

“Y’all needed this,” Daryl sneers at her. “Y’ain’t like us. You never had t’ learn the difference between livin’ and survivin’ before the whole damn world went t’ shit. Lucy ain’t givin’ us false hope. Lucy’s the only chance in hell we got at gettin’ outta this alive.”

Nico smiles at him from where she sits and gives him a lowkey thumbs-up. Lori shuts her mouth and holds up her hands in mock surrender.

Lucy can’t be mad at Lori for freaking out. After all, her husband took a leap of faith that led nowhere and now she and her son are trapped inside a building that’s going to explode in approximately one hour and fifty-three minutes. Which, on top of whatever Shane did to her, is enough to put even a neurotypical Southern housewife on the edge of a meltdown. Still, they’re running out of time and having empathy for Lori isn’t high on her list of priorities at the moment.

Worse, she’s blushing from the tops of her ears to the hollow between her breasts just because Daryl said _us_. It’s enough to make her heart beat so wildly that she thinks she’s having a panic attack until she realizes that she hasn’t had a crush on anyone in years and she’s not used to feeling so fucking twitterpated.

Lucy bites her lip and forces herself to meet Lori’s eyes. “I wanted to give you all one night without fear before I told you that you have to make a choice between living with your fear in this new world or staying here to die,” she tells her softly. “No one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.”

“Okay,” Shane drawls, “how do you think we should do that? Since you seem to think you know everything.”

Lucy rolls her eyes at him. “Dr. Jenner gave me a portable hard drive with all of the information the C. D. C. and the W. H. O. had on the virus,” she informs him, “including their attempts to make a vaccine using the attenuated HZV-B virus. It didn’t work, because they couldn’t weaken the virus enough to cause an immunoresponse that wasn’t hypercytokinemia—a fever high enough to kill you with a side of nausea, inflammation, and fatigue—and everyone they injected with their vaccine died. I did an experiment last night and my blood can at least temporarily cure the latent viral infection that all of you have. I need you to help me test whether or not my blood can work as a permanent cure, and eventually I’m going to need a lab so I can make a real vaccine using my antibodies instead of the attenuated virus as the antigen. Which hopefully won’t cause a fatal immunoresponse.”

It becomes clear to her from the confused and hopeless looks they’re giving her that she’s throwing around a lot of words that nobody else understands. These people aren’t stupid, but they haven’t been living with an incurable autoimmune disease for almost ten years and they never had a reason to learn all about immunology.

“It’s okay,” Cath whispers to her conspiratorially, “just slow down and don’t infodump all at once.”

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “Okay,” she ekes the _oh_ sound out into an _ooh_ , “sorry. What I meant is that I need to inject some of you with my blood and then draw your blood a week later to see if you’re cured. Then, if the cure works, I’m going to keep drawing your blood once a week to see if the cure is permanent or temporary. I don’t want to make a vaccine until I have a lab somewhere and I’m not going to inject any of you with a weakened strain of the virus because that could kill you. Also, at some point I’m going to need to find a zombie to experiment on.”

Rick frowns at her, the space between his eyebrows furrowing. “Why?” he asks.

“It’s either that or wait until one of you inevitably gets exposed to the live infection,” Lucy answers, “and I want to know if I’m capable of curing the live infection before that happens.”

“What makes you so sure it will?” Andrea wants to know.

Lucy snorts. “This virus invades the brain,” she points out, “and the research I read shows that the latent infection alters your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala. Those specific parts of your brain control impulsive behavior and emotional responses. Amy saw the zombie that was about to bite her and screamed instead of trying to get away. This virus alters the brain of the intermediate host over time to make them more likely to become a final host. While a latent viral infection is typically asymptomatic, external factors like stress can sometimes cause an acute infection.”

“It’s like herpes,” Amy chimes in, “the herpes simplex virus can fuse with the DNA in your neurons and reactivate every time you stress out. Which is why people with herpes sometimes have cold sores.”

“I wasn’t going to bring up herpes,” Lucy mumbles, “but you’re right. This virus is latent in the same way that herpes is: episomally.”

“Which is a good thing,” Amy says, “because otherwise we’d be dealing with proviral latency and most proviruses are pretty much impossible to cure without doing permanent damage to the host.”

Rick exhales a sigh of relief. At least that’s something. It means a cure is theoretically possible, not just half-baked hope. “What do you want us to do?” he asks.

Lucy yawns into the hollow of one palm before she answers. “I want Amy to draw at least one pint of blood from me before we leave,” she says, “and I want at least two people to get a brain scan. Oh!” she holds up both hands and looks at him with her eyes open wide behind her glasses. “I should’ve told you sooner. There was no latent infection in your system. I think you have the potential for natural immunity because at this point the only difference between us immunologically is that no zombies have bitten or scratched you.”

Rick gapes at the librarian as she muffles a louder yawn with both palms. Lori turns to look at him over her shoulder, wide-eyed. Rick gives his wife a brittle smile—fragile and easily shattered. Shane clenches his jaw and tries not to let anyone see that he feels more alone than he ever has before.

“We have an hour and a half before the building gets blown off the map,” Nico says. “Let’s make it count.”

* * *

After she gives more blood for science, Lucy falls asleep at one of the workstations and takes a nap while everybody else scrambles to pack their bags. Daryl goes to grab his bag and stays in the control room while her friends go looking for MRI and CT machines to watch over her. Lucy makes a soft noise and hides her face in the crook of one elbow. There’s an industrial barbell in her left ear shaped like an arrow. Daryl is too hungover to find the irony in that, but it makes him smile.

Jenner is up in his office looking at a framed photograph of his wife smiling when the lights go out. Jacqui drags her feet in her room while T-Dog watches from the hall and worries. Dale emerges from another room and frowns as the doctor walks down the hallway like a man in a funeral march.

“What’s going on?” the old man asks, “is turning everything off part of the doomsday protocols?”

“Yes,” Jenner answers, “energy is being prioritized, and that means the system is dropping all the nonessential uses of power. Zone 5 is shutting itself down. It’s designed to keep the computers running until the last possible second—” he gestures vaguely at the clock with thirty-one minutes and twenty-eight seconds ticking down, “—and that started as we approached the half-hour mark. Right on schedule.”

“There is no we,” Nico tells him flatly, “we’re not staying here to die with you.”

Jenner nods sadly and stops at the foot of the ramp to look at Andrea. “It was the French,” he says, “they were the last ones to hold out as far as I know. While our people were bolting out the doors and committing suicide in the hallways, they stayed in their labs until the end because they thought they were close to a solution.”

“What happened?” Jacqui wants to know.

“Same thing that happened here,” Jenner says. “No power grid. Ran out of juice. The world runs on fossil fuel!” he shakes his head and exhales a horrible laugh. “I mean, how stupid is that?”

Shane clenches his jaw and follows the doctor up the ramp. “Let me tell you something,” he snarls.

Rick grabs him by his shirt and yanks him back. “To hell with it, Shane,” he says. “I don’t even care. Lori—” he turns and looks over his shoulder to see if his wife and son are still with him, “—grab our things. Everybody, I hope you’ve got your stuff because we’re getting out of here now!”

Of course that’s when the alarm goes off. Lucy wakes up with a groan and puts her glasses back on before she looks at the doomsday clock. Kate scoops Romy up into her arms so Lucy knows her puppy didn’t get lost in the clamor. Lucy glances at Daryl as she uses her cane to get back on her feet and puts her backpack on. Daryl is staring right at her, the fluorescent halo of light making his gaze even more intense. Lucy bites her lip and looks away because she doesn’t want to start blushing again. There’s no time for being shy, because time is running out.

“Warning,” Vi says robotically, “thirty minutes to decontamination.”

“Everybody,” Shane winces at the sound of the alarm, “y’all heard Rick. Let’s go!”

Jenner looks up from the recording he’s making that should theoretically be uploaded to a black box offsite, going through every last motion. “You know what’s out there,” he says and Jacqui stops halfway to the exit as soon as she hears those words, “a short, brutal life and an agonizing death. You know what this does. You’ve all seen it,” he turns to look at Rick before he asks, “is that really what you want for your wife and son?”

Rick shakes his head. “I don’t want this!” he shouts and spits the words out like they leave a bad taste in his mouth.

Jenner rises from his seat and steps out of view of the camera. “You do want this,” he insists in a hushed voice that echoes into a feedback loop of whispers, “last night you said you knew it was just a matter of time before everybody you loved was dead. Wouldn’t it be kinder, more compassionate, to just hold your loved ones and wait for the clock to run down?”

Lori sucks in a shuddering breath. Carol whimpers and clutches Sophia close against her chest. Shane glares at the former sheriff. While he’s been keeping these people together for almost two post-apocalyptic months, Rick couldn’t keep his shit together for a week. Why does he get to lead? Why do things come so easily to him, things Shane desperately wants but can’t have? Why doesn’t Shane just man up and _take_ everything he wants, everything he deserves?

Maybe the librarian’s right, and this virus is going to turn everyone into the worst possible version of themselves. Shane grits his teeth around a frustrated noise. “What?” he snaps. “You really said that? After all your big talk?”

Rick doesn’t even look at him because he only has eyes for Lori. “I had to keep hope alive,” he says gravely, “didn’t I?”

Jenner scoffs. “There is no hope,” he retorts. “There never was.”

Lucy glances down at the pink scar on her forearm shaped like teeth, the gauze wrapped around the bite that saved Amy’s life to keep her from anxiously picking at the scabs. “There’s always hope,” she tells him softly. “I’m living proof.”

Rick flicks his gaze to her before he nods, a sharp descent of his chin. “You’re lying,” he says. “You’re lying about no hope. You could’ve bolted with the rest or taken the easy way out. You didn’t. You chose the hard path. Why?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jenner says forlornly.

“It does matter,” Rick insists. “It always matters. You stayed when the others ran. Why?”

“Not because I wanted to,” Jenner tells him flatly. “I made a promise to Candace, to my wife.”

“Test Subject Nineteen was your wife?” Lori asks even though she already knows the answer.

Jenner swallows thickly and nods. “She begged me to keep going as long as I could,” he says in a quiet, broken voice. “How could I say no? She was dying. It should’ve been me on that table. I wouldn’t have mattered to anybody. She was a loss to the world. Hell…” he shuts his eyes and shakes his head. “She ran this place. I just worked here. She was an Einstein in our field. She could’ve done something about this. She,” he gestures to Lucy, “can still do something about it. Not me.”

There are five minutes left on the doomsday clock. Lucy smiles at the doctor and shuffles up the ramp without saying goodbye. Cath and Kate are waiting in the elevator at the other end of the hallway. Daryl follows her out the door and draws back the string of his crossbow to nock an arrow once he’s in the elevator with her.

 _Ain’t nobody gonna slow us down_ , he thinks, _nothin’ is gonna stop me from keepin’ her safe_.

“Your wife didn’t have a choice,” Rick says urgently, “we do. That’s all we want: a choice, a chance.”

“Let us keep trying as long as we can,” Lori implores him, “I know you said that once that door closed it wasn’t going to open again, but—”

“Lucy has the override codes,” Nico says, “she can open the door.”

“There’s your chance,” Jenner murmurs. “Take it.”

Rick heaves a sigh of relief that shudders through his whole body. “I’m grateful,” he says.

“The day will come when you won’t be,” Jenner tells him.

* * *

Lucy holds the elevator at the dead end of the hallway open for everyone until the clock has ticked down to three minutes. There’s no time to wait for T-Dog to convince Jacqui not to stay. Glenn shouts at her as she clicks the button to close the sliding doors, but he stops as soon as Cath shoots him a stern look. T-Dog and Jacqui clamber out of the building with less than a minute to spare.

When the building goes kablooey, the air catches fire and the earth shakes beneath them. Daryl slings his crossbow over his shoulder before he jerks the door of his truck open, shoves Lucy inside, and crawls on top of her. Lucy makes a startled noise that sounds like _eep_. It gets swallowed by the almighty sound of the explosion, like the world is ending all over again. Daryl puts his weight on his elbows and knees because he doesn’t want her to feel him getting hard. Lucy bites her lip and looks up into his eyes. Daryl thinks about kissing her, but he shuts his eyes and inhales the sweet cloying smell of her hair undercut by the sharp tang of her sweat instead. Lucy ignores the absurd impulse to hold him until the tension in his shoulders is gone.

Nico honks the horn of her jeep and that blare of sound breaks the spell. Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and lets her squirm under him until he’s sitting behind the wheel.

When he drives off into the burning daylight, Lucy yawns and falls asleep on his shoulder. Daryl flicks his gaze to the hellfire in his rearview mirror and smiles to himself, one corner of his mouth unfurling with crooked subtlety.

 _Yeah_ , he thinks, _I could get used to this_.

Famous last words.


	19. House of 1,000 Corpses

**Adapt. Adjust.**  
**It ends or it doesn’t.**  
**It ends or it doesn’t.**  
**We do not perish.**

Caitlyn Siehl, “It Ends or It Doesn’t”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. II**  
_The Heart’s Desire_  
**Chapter 19**  
House of 1,000 Corpses

* * *

_Tuesday, 17 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 65._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Fairlie-Poplar District._

* * *

Lucy wakes up with a startled, inarticulate noise that sounds like _gah!_ once they’re back in the Fairlie-Poplar district. It’s like a record turning and scratching, the abrupt way she’s fast asleep one minute and wide awake the next. Daryl snorts as she lifts her head off his shoulder and groggily looks out the window. There’s something damp on his shirt, but he doesn’t give a shit. Lucy can drool on him anytime she wants. Daryl has gotten worse shit on his clothes before—one of the many hazards of hunting is getting down and dirty, and he’s gotten shitfaced drunk enough times to have woken up covered in his own vomit more than once—and knowing that she trusts him enough to fall asleep while they’re alone together eliminates the ick factor.

“Hey,” he says and stops his truck behind the church van they converted into a supply van in the middle of the night. “You always wake up all at once like that?”

Lucy blushes and looks away. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound awkwardly.

“It’s cute,” Daryl mutters as heat crawls up the back of his neck. “You’re cute.”

Lucy bites her lip and blushes harder. _Okay_ , she thinks as she tries not to panic and fails miserably, _he thinks I’m cute. It doesn’t mean he likes me back. I can’t get my hopes up. There’s no room for a broken heart in this new world_. “Thank you,” she mumbles before she asks, “Where are we?”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils as disappointment coils deep and tight in his guts like a parasite. “Rick thinks we oughta stay with Guillermo and that gang of spics tonight,” he says, “we’re gonna head out to the army base in the mornin’.”

Lucy sighs as soon as the racist slur comes out of his mouth. _There’s another reason not to get my hopes up_ , she thinks. _Daryl isn’t as bad as Merle was, but he’s still kind of a bigot_.

Daryl isn’t much of a talker, but he’s talked to her about his family and she’s heard enough to know his parents didn’t raise him right. When he was seven, his mother died in a house fire she caused by spilling half a bottle of wine on herself and falling asleep with a cigarette in her mouth. Apparently she was too drunk to change her clothes before she passed out. Will Dixon, their father, never forgave Merle for sneaking out of the house instead of keeping an eye on her.

After she died and Merle left to join the army, Will either lost track of Daryl for days at a time or took him into the woods for weeklong hunting and camping trips. Daryl watched his father die on the last hunting trip they took at the hands—and teeth—of the first zombie he ever saw, about a week before he came to the city to get Merle out of jail.

Despite his crappy upbringing, he can be respectful and kind to the people he thinks are worth respecting. Trouble is, the only person in the group Daryl seems to respect is Lucy. Once upon a time, being singled out by someone like him as the only person worth paying attention to would’ve made her feel special and superior. Lucy doesn’t feel special now. It’s frustrating, getting to know the different sides of Daryl and seeing him in a way other people don’t, seeing the sides of him that he won’t let other people see. It makes her doubt that his good points are real because she’s the only person who can see them and because seeing those other sides of him made her _like_ him. It’s hard for Lucy to trust her feelings. Daryl calling her cute and then being racist in the span of the same minute isn’t making that any easier. It’s painfully obvious that he’s never critically thought about the good ol’ Southern values he grew up with, even though he’s over forty and that means he’s old enough to know better. There’s no excuse for that, no matter how Lucy feels.

Lucy sighs longer and louder than before and taps her earpiece as she gets out of his truck. “Kate,” she says as soon as her friends tune in. “What do you know about Fort Benning?”

* * *

_Tuesday, 17 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 65._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Nursing Home._

* * *

Rick parks outside the weathered brick wreckage of the building that obscures the entrance to the garage from prying eyes. Lori takes Carl by the hand and Carol puts one hand on her daughter’s shoulder so Sophia can keep hugging the doll that’s become her comfort object. Lucy activates the modified joy buzzer on the door of her trailer before she shuffles over to where Cath, Kate, and Nico are waiting on her. While the others stick to handguns and shotguns as their weapons of choice, Daryl carries his crossbow in both hands with his grip loose and ready for anything.

“It looks like they’re barely hanging on,” Andrea murmurs. “What makes you think they’ll take in strangers?”

Daryl snorts. “All them guns we gave ’em, they’ll probably throw us a party,” he deadpans before he turns to squint at Rick and says, “good call. For once.”

“Guillermo also has a thing for Lucy,” T-Dog points out, “I don’t think he’d turn her away.”

Lucy, meanwhile, is looking at the ground while she walks to avoid fumbling with her cane. There’s more rubble in the ruins than before, and tripping is a legitimate concern for someone who’s crippled. After he jumps through the hole in the wall into the courtyard, Daryl slings his crossbow back over his shoulder and helps her down by putting his hands on her waist and lifting her like she weighs nothing at all. Of course Lucy weighs about two hundred pounds, so him being able to lift her up like it’s nothing when she knows it’s not is one of the sexiest things in the world to her.

When her feet touch the ground, her face is hot enough to attract a heat-seeking missile. Good thing nobody has the technology to launch one into the sky above the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

“Where are their lookouts?” Glenn wants to know, a sense of unease creeping into his voice.

Lucy stops to look around the courtyard because as a librarian she’s hardwired to find the answers to questions and pales at the sight of a zombie with a tattoo on its neck chewing on a mouthful of rotting meat. It’s Miguel, zombified and eating the remains of Jorge’s corpse. There’s a bullet hole in Jorge’s head and from the way his body is laid out it looks like he died on his knees, like he was executed. Carlito—whose corpse is pushing up daisies by the patch of wild strawberries Lucy found behind the corroded furnace—and other men that she vaguely recognizes from the Mexican standoff in the garage were all killed the same way.

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” Shane growls.

Amy gasps and covers her mouth with one hand as Andrea draws her pistol from its holster. Lori turns Carl to face her instead of the slaughter. Carol throws her arms tight around her daughter as Sophia whimpers and turns to hide her face in the front of her mother’s shirt.

When she turns to look at Rick, he has a stricken expression on his face and he’s pointing his Colt at Miguel’s head. Lucy looks him dead in the eyes and shakes hers. “I need a zombie to transfuse,” she tells him softly. “Please don’t shoot him. Let me make his death mean something.”

Rick gives her a nod as his jaw clenches tight and the muscles in his neck tense. “Okay,” he shouts as low moans echo ominously from every nook and cranny of the courtyard, “nobody shoot that one if you can help it, but we’re taking the rest of them out.”

“What about the noise?” Dale asks with a hint of urgency in his voice.

Rick shakes his head slowly. “To hell with the noise,” he says, quiet and deadly.

Lucy hooks the handle of her cane in the crook of her elbow and covers her ears as Nico, Andrea, Kate, Daryl, Rick, Shane, Dale, Glenn, and T-Dog line up like a firing squad and shoot the place up. Daryl is using the pistol he was carrying tucked in the waistband of his pants instead of his crossbow and Lucy can feel a migraine coming on like a kick in the teeth.

When they’ve dropped all the bodies and the damage is done, Kate sweeps the zombified Miguel’s feet out from under him and kicks him in the back to make him fall on his face instead of his ass. Nico crouches and ties his hands behind him with an ethernet cable because that’s what she had in her bag.

Lucy snaps on a white surgical glove before she grabs the zombie by his oily hair, yanks his head back, and gags him with a dishrag and glittery duct tape. “Amy,” she ekes the name out into two distinct syllables, “you know how to do an IV, right? I could just stick a syringe in the side of his neck, but I might need more than ten or twelve cc’s of blood for this experiment. I need you to start an IV so I can transfuse him until it works.”

Amy nods. “I can do that,” she says, “if you have a central line kit or a percutaneous catheter.”

Lucy pulls one of the central venous catheter kits she found at the C. D. C. out of her backpack and hands it over to the only person in the group who knows how to use it. Amy snaps on the gloves Lucy offers her, kneels on the ground next to the immobilized zombie, and waits for Kate and Nico to turn him over before she puts the catheter in his forearm. Lucy adjusts her glasses and unzips another compartment of her backpack.

“Wait,” Rick holds up one hand to stop her, “you’re doing this now?”

Lucy turns to look at him over her shoulder and nods. “It takes a minute for blood to circulate through a healthy person’s body,” she informs him. “Candace Jenner clocked the average heart rate of a zombie at twenty beats per minute. Contrariwise, live people can have a resting heart rate anywhere from thirty to eighty beats per minute depending on how physically active they are. Any heart rate below sixty beats per minute is bradycardic. Although you don’t show any symptoms of bradycardia until your heart rate is below forty beats per minute. Anyway,” she says before she pauses to breathe for a few seconds, “my point is that it should take approximately three minutes for my blood to circulate through his body. I have the mini cooler with the unit of my blood that Amy drew yesterday in my backpack. After she puts in the IV, we should know whether my antibodies will cure both strains of the virus in five minutes or less.”

There’s a moment of palpable fear during the transfusion before the zombie that was Miguel dies all over again. It’s actually kind of anticlimactic, a melancholy fade to black instead of something more spectacular. Lucy yanks the catheter out of his forearm to stop the flow of her blood from the IV bag, pulls a dark green Sharpie out of a small pocket on the front of her backpack, and marks how much blood it took to cure an infection that was fatal to everyone who wasn’t her approximately three minutes ago.

“Son of a bitch,” Shane mutters under his breath, his inflection more awestruck than angry the second time around.

Nico unties and ungags Miguel before they leave the courtyard with their guns drawn. Lucy may have changed the world in five minutes or less, but the day isn’t over yet.

It’s dark inside the nursing home, shreds of harsh daylight making the shadows percolate and even more doom and gloom waiting for them around every corner. While the post-apocalyptic gangsters with hearts of gold were shot in the courtyard, the elderly were killed where they sat or stood. Whoever did this must’ve killed the crones and curmudgeons first before they led the men out of the building and executed them.

 _Miguel had a gunshot wound in his chest_ , Lucy thinks, _but these people were all shot in the head and it looks like the people who killed them never missed. Maybe he tried to run and they let him turn to punish him_.

Sophia catches sight of a corpse with blowflies ecstatically buzzing around it and bursts into tears.

Daryl turns back to look at the little girl and snarls at her. “Put a sock in it!”

“You leave her alone,” Carol whispers angrily.

Daryl glares at her. “Shut her up or I will!” he retorts.

“You back the hell off right now,” Lori snaps at him.

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and grits his teeth around a frustrated noise before he backs off.

“What if the people who did all this are still here somewhere?” Lucy whispers. “Daryl just doesn’t want those people to come and shoot us too because they heard Sophia. Right?”

Daryl nods. Lucy understands where he’s coming from, even if nobody else does. “Yeah,” he mutters. “Sorry.”

Carol hugs Sophia tighter and gives him a sliver of a smile, a nonverbal acceptance of his apology.

“Are we staying or going?” Lori asks Rick.

“We don’t have the fuel to find somewhere else to stay that’s safe,” Rick tells her.

“We hunker down here for the night,” Shane cuts in. “Rick, you, me, and Daryl should go sweep the building and make sure we’re alone.”

Rick flicks his gaze to Lori before he nods. After they sweep the second floor of the building and barricade the doors, they storm the atrium. It’s full of dead bodies and more blowflies, their persistent buzzing the closest thing to a eulogy these people are ever going to get. Lucy shuffles over to the body of Felipe’s grandmother and squats to close her sightless eyes.

“We’ve cleared a few rooms upstairs,” Rick says. “We can barricade those and spend the night up there. We’ll be all right.”

“You mean it this time?” Carol asks quietly but viciously. “Or are you lying to us like you did before?”

“Hey,” Lori tells her sharply, “that’s unfair, and no help at all.”

Glenn swallows hard at the sight of Mr. Gilbert dead on the floor next to his nebulizer. “What the hell happened?” he wants to know.

“What do you think?” Andrea says. “These people got overrun.”

Lucy flops into one of the scattered chairs and puts her backpack on the floor as Daryl scoffs at that.

Andrea narrows her eyes at him. “Something to say?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Daryl says, “how ’bout observant?”

Andrea folds her arms loosely across her chest. “Observant,” she echoes as she arches her eyebrows at him like a challenge, “big word for a guy like you. Three whole syllables.”

“Zombies didn’t do this,” Daryl says, “they didn’t show up ’til all this went down. Somebody attacked this place, killed all these people and took whatever they wanted. See, they’re all shot in the head, execution-style.”

Andrea looks at him skeptically even as comprehension starts to dawn. Amy just looks horrified.

“Daryl’s right,” Lucy informs her. “I noticed it outside. Jorge—the guy who gave me a concussion—and everyone else in the courtyard died on their knees with their hands up. There’s no other way to explain how their bodies fell. Technically any killing done at close range is execution-style, but the men we met were taken out of their home and shot in the open. It was an execution. There’s no other word for what happened to them.”

“Y’all are worried about the dead,” Daryl murmurs, “but I’d be much more worried about the people who came here and did all this.” At that, he looks at Andrea like she’s the dumbest blonde he’s ever met. “Get a dictionary,” he snarks. “Look it up,” he points at himself with one finger and bites down on the consonant. “Observant.”


	20. Reload

**Your heart is beating, isn’t it?**  
**You’re not in chains, are you?**  
**There is nothing more pathetic than caution**  
**when headlong might save a life,**  
**even, possibly, your own.**

Mary Oliver, “Moments”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 1**  
Living Dead Girl  
**Vol. II**  
_The Heart’s Desire_  
**Chapter 20**  
Reload

* * *

_Tuesday, 17 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 65._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Nursing Home._

* * *

There’s no sign of Guillermo alive, dead, or undead anywhere. All that’s left of him is a bag of Smartfood popcorn—the white cheddar kind Lucy used to snack on during her undergraduate days because that’s what they sold in the main dining hall at Seattle University—and a can of beets. Whoever massacred his people cleaned out his fridge, but they didn’t look under his bed.

Lucy shuffles up the staircase into the room closest to the stairwell, where Lori and Carol are handing out paper cups and plates to prepare for dinner while everybody else has collapsed to sit on the floor like the world has fallen out from under them and they’re so desperate for something concrete that cheap linoleum will do. Romy has both paws over her snout because the smell of decay is hard on her little puppy nose. Harley is curled up next to Cath with his head on her thigh, panting and drooling on the right leg of her jeans. Daryl, Rick, and Shane arrive a few minutes later empty-handed and heavy-hearted.

“They ransacked the kitchen,” Shane grumbles. “All we found is one can.”

“They hit the dispensary too,” Rick adds. “Tore the door off its hinges. Took everything except this.”

Lori takes the package of lozenges with a sigh. “At least it’s something,” she whispers more to herself than anybody else.

“So,” Daryl says, “we came back here for cough drops and garbanzo beans.”

Nico unzips one of the small pockets on the front of Lucy’s backpack and hands the archer a can opener. “If we’d waited to barricade the doors, we could’ve brought dinner in from the trailer,” she points out. “There’s still a lot of produce that needs to get eaten before it goes bad.”

Lucy holds up the unopened bag of popcorn and the can of beets. “Guillermo had these in his room,” she informs them, “in case you want something other than garbanzo beans for dinner.”

“Yes!” Cath snatches the beets and strokes the picture on the label with a look of pure bliss on her face.

Lucy snorts. “This is why we always say you’re an octogenarian on the inside even though I’m the one with arthritis,” she mumbles. “Your thing for beets is something I will never understand.”

“You went to his room?” Daryl asks, trying not to sound jealous and failing miserably.

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “I didn’t see him in the courtyard,” she clarifies, “and I know somebody would’ve told me if he was killed somewhere in the building. Maybe he survived.”

Daryl snorts. “Maybe he turned n’ walked away,” he mutters. “You ever think of that?”

Lucy sighs. “I saved his life,” she tells him softly. “I needed to know if that meant something or nothing in the end.”

Amy smiles at her from where she’s sitting next to Andrea with her head on her sister’s shoulder. “You saved me,” she murmurs. “It means something. Trust me.”

Lucy smiles back as Shane tosses a bag of off-brand potato chips to Glenn and pulls a bottle of wine out of his duffle bag.

“Hey,” Daryl says, “is that to share?”

Shane nods and hands over the bottle. Daryl uses the corkscrew attacked to his pocketknife to open it and takes a long drink.

“I’d go easy on that stuff,” Lori says. “Let’s not forget where we are.”

Daryl squints his eyes at her, scrutinizing. “Yes ma’am,” he says.

T-Dog brings a plate to Jacqui, who’s sitting with her arms wrapped around her legs. “You okay?” he asks.

Jacqui lifts her head up and glares at him. “Why wouldn’t I be?” she scoffs and shakes her head. “We’re spending the night in a building that stinks so bad of rotten corpses that I want to puke my guts out, I’m dining on condiments, and hoping I don’t get eaten by the walking dead before dawn. What’s not to like?”

T-Dog hangs his head. “Sorry,” he tells her with a heartbroken edge in the quiet tone of his voice before he leaves the room to sit in the hall and keep watch over the stairwell.

Lori turns to look at Rick. “What’s next?” she asks. “We need to decide.”

Shane lets his gaze linger on her a few seconds too long before he turns to look at her husband. What he thought he had with his best friend’s wife was habit-forming, and habits are hard to break. “Fort Benning,” he says. “Right?”

Rick turns to look at Lucy. “What do you think?”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek anxiously. “I think driving two hundred miles is a big risk,” she informs him, “but even if that weren’t true, I think it might be too big for just us.”

“What makes you think that?” Shane wants to know.

Lucy sighs. “Liam—Kate’s husband—did basic training at Fort Benning,” she says.

Kate swallows a mouthful of beans and nods, a quick bob of her head. “Liam was a tank operator,” she explains because Rick didn’t hear any of the stories that she told around the campfire while he was comatose, “he trained with the second battalion of the 69th Armored Regiment.”

Lucy adjusts her glasses and forces herself to look the former sheriff in the eyes. “Apparently the base occupies a hundred and eighty-two thousand acres of land,” she tells him. “There are fifteen adults in our group. How do you expect fifteen civilians to hold a military compound that size with hordes of zombies everywhere and people running around just taking whatever the hell they want?”

Shane has to admit the know-it-all librarian has a point. When he thought of Fort Benning, he was so caught up with getting Lori and Carl the hell out of dodge that he didn’t think of how big the base was or that it might be too difficult for them to defend with so few people. Maybe his idea isn’t such a good one after all. “I hate to say this,” he grumbles, “but I agree with her.”

Lucy gapes at him in shock. _Okay_ , she thinks,  _Satan must be having a snowball fight right about now_. While she’s the worst at social cues, she knows that Shane doesn’t like her and she didn’t expect him to agree with her on anything until hell froze over.

“Lucy’s right,” Daryl says. “Merle was stationed at Fort Benning a while back. I stayed with him until he got caught tweakin’ and they dishonorably discharged his sorry ass. Over a hundred thousand people used to live on base. There’s miles of trainin’ fields, and some woods, acres out in the open. It’d be too much for just us even if the place ain’t overrun with zombies. Or worse.”

Lucy smiles at him shyly as silence falls over them like a shadow. There’s still hope, but the raw horror of everything they’ve been through to find the cure feels overwhelming right now.

“All these people,” Glenn says in a quiet, shellshocked voice. “Who would’ve done something like this? Just coming in here and murdering everybody, even all the old people. How sick is that?”

Lori shoots him a pointed look as Sophia wails softly, like she’s about to start crying all over again. “That’s not something we need to be discussing right now,” she hisses.

“Better if we get some sleep, huh?” Shane says as Rick stands up and takes Glenn aside.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly and uses her cane to get back on her feet before she shuffles out of the room to hear whatever they’re going to say. Daryl follows her into the hallway and shuts the door behind them.

“Those kids in there are terrified,” Shane growls. “We’re all terrified. Lucy may have found a cure for this virus, but a cure ain’t gonna save us from whatever else is out there.”

“Guys, I’m really sorry,” Glenn says forlornly. “Guess I wasn’t thinking.”

Rick sighs heavily. “We’re all rattled,” he says, “and exhausted. Lucy, you were right. We have to learn to live with fear. No one is thinking clearly, but we need to start. Our lives depend on it.”

“Damn right,” Shane adds. “We can’t ever let our guard down again. Back at camp, we were having us a fish fry. No one on watch. Our people died, and they didn’t need to.”

After that, the former deputy turns and walks over to where T-Dog and Dale are sitting with their plates in the stairwell. Lucy shuffles over and exhales a soft noise that sounds like _oof_ as she flops down to sit in the corner where the wall meets the metal railing. Daryl offers the bottle of wine to T-Dog, who chugs the last of the dark red liquid inside.

“Fort Benning isn’t an option,” Shane murmurs, “we have no idea what our next move is gonna be.”

“I don’t care where we go,” T-Dog says, “as long as it’s anywhere but here.”

“I met a man named Morgan.” Rick turns to look at his best friend. “I left one of our walkies with him, but I haven’t been able to make contact since I left. I think I might be out of range because he stayed in his house instead of following me to the city.”

“You want to go back for him,” Shane deduces. “You know how risky that is.”

Rick heaves another sigh. “Morgan saved my life, Shane,” he retorts. “It’s the least I can do. Besides, we need more people.”

“Fine,” Shane grumbles. “I don’t even care anymore. Let’s just try to get some shuteye. Okay?”

* * *

After they cleared out four rooms—two on either side of the stairwell—they moved beds from some of the other rooms into those rooms to sleep on because not using them would’ve been a waste. Rick, Lori and Carl are staying in the room closest to the stairwell. Shane, T-Dog, Glenn, and Daryl are sleeping in the room across the hall. Lucy, Cath, Kate and Nico are sleeping in the room next door to theirs. Jacqui gets a bed to herself in the room across the hall from them while Amy and Andrea share one bed and Sophia and Carol share another. It would be cozy, if they couldn’t smell the dead bodies down the hall.

Lucy stares at the ceiling and watches tiny particles of light dancing in the dark, photons in a quantum state. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

Kate yawns. “What for?” she asks.

Lucy swallows thickly. “I know things are supposed to change when you grow up,” she answers softly, “but I didn’t want to grow apart from you. I’m not married. I haven’t had a boyfriend since high school. I don’t have friends who aren’t you, and I was lonely. Cath and I had dinner maybe once a month. Kate and I got to hang out a lot more after we both moved home, but she was in Texas for almost two years before that and I went to Missouri for grad school for another two years. Nico and I saw each other maybe twice a year for birthdays, and we all know she doesn’t care about birthdays since her family is weird and they never celebrated them. I planned this road trip because I missed you and now we’re stuck here and it’s all my fault. Vera is _dead_ ,” she bites her bottom lip hard to stop herself from crying as her voice shudders with the amount of sadness in that one syllable, “and it’s all my fault.”

Cath shakes her head slowly even though she knows Lucy can’t see what she’s doing in the darkness. “Vera wanted to come,” she whispers, “she was our friend.”

Lucy bites her bottom lip harder and shuts her eyes in a doomed attempt to keep the tears away. “I know,” she whispers back.

“It’s a two-way street, you know,” Nico adds. “You could’ve just called or texted me and told me you were lonely instead of doing that anxiety thing you do where you think you’re annoying us, even though you know we don’t think you’re annoying because we love you.”

“We don’t blame you,” Kate tells her matter-of-factly. “You need to stop blaming yourself.”

Cath narrows her eyes and frowns even though her best friend still can’t see what she’s doing. “Wait,” she bites down on the consonant and Lucy can hear the wrinkle in between her eyebrows in the hint of shrillness that creeps into her voice, “is that why you’ve been hanging out with Daryl? Were you avoiding us because you felt guilty?”

Lucy snorts. “Nope,” she says and pops the _p_ sound. “I’ve been hanging out with Daryl because I don’t feel lonely when I’m with him. I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel afraid…” she smiles through her tears in the dark and says, “I feel better. You can’t blame me for wanting to feel that way all the time.”

“Damn.” Nico grins so audaciously that it’s audible in her voice. “You’ve got it bad.”

Lucy sighs. “I know,” she mumbles.

Of course the walls are thin enough that Daryl overheard every word they said. After he hides his face in one hand because this is the cutest thing ever and he doesn’t know how to handle that, he feels the heat flush his cheeks and crawl up the back of his neck in the dark. It feels like he’s on fire, but he doesn’t give a shit.

Lucy is the kind of girl a man burns for.

* * *

_Wednesday, 18 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 66._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_369 Ormond Street Southeast._

* * *

When the morning comes, Lucy wakes up and puts her glasses back on before she grabs the bottle of water in the pocket on the side of her backpack. Daryl, on the other hand, wakes up with morning wood and makes a frustrated noise low in his throat. There’s no time for him to talk to her before they leave the nursing home because the others can’t get out of the Vatos’ graveyard fast enough. It’s too early for a night owl like her to stay awake, so Lucy takes a nap while Nico drives past the zoo and parks the jeep in front of a house with a white picket fence and a pile of dead zombies smoldering in the middle of the street. Unfortunately the drive is only a few miles, and her nap is rudely interrupted by Rick banging on the door of her trailer and shouting her name.

Lucy makes a garbled noise in her throat and yanks her skirt back on before she opens the door. “What the hell?” she yelps, her voice pitching awkwardly higher.

Rick is standing in the street with the meat of his shoulder gnawed on and oozing blood. There’s another man standing next to him, a black man with a gangly teenage boy who looks mortified that his dad is carrying him around like a princess in his arms.

“This is Morgan, and his son Duane,” Rick tells her urgently, “Duane was bitten.”

“Rick was bitten too,” Morgan adds, stating the blatantly obvious.

Lucy forces herself to look the former sheriff in the eyes for a few seconds before she looks away. “I don’t have enough blood to transfuse both of you,” she informs him, even though she has a hunch he already knows that.

Rick grits his teeth and nods, a sharp descent of his chin. “You said I might be immune,” he says gravely. “I think I’ll take my chances.”

Lucy sighs. “Okay,” she says. “Get me Amy.”

Rick gives her another nod before he goes looking for Amy. Morgan stays outside with Duane as she goes to get the bag of blood out of her minifridge and a bottle of ethanol—it stings like a motherfucker, but it’s better than pouring 1:10 diluted bleach solution into an open wound. When she steps through the door of her trailer and squints at the early morning sunlight glaring down on her, Lucy becomes aware that everyone is watching her. Daryl is staring right at her and his blue eyes look even more intense, like burning daylight.

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek and tries to focus on Duane. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but I won’t lie to you. This is going to hurt like hell.”

“I don’t wanna die,” Duane says in a shrill, fearful voice, like he can’t believe this horrible thing is happening to him.

Lucy shakes her head slowly and smiles at him.  “I won’t let that happen,” she says.

Morgan sets his jaw and shrugs out of the long-sleeved flannel shirt he’s wearing on top of a t-shirt so filthy he must’ve been wearing it for days. Maybe even weeks. “Here,” he says mournfully, “cover your mouth so the dead won’t hear you scream.”

Duane nods and stuffs the shirt into his mouth just as Lucy pours the ethanol over the bite on his forearm to disinfect the wound. Amy puts the catheter in his hand because he’s dehydrated and it was difficult to find a vein in either of his arms. Lori has to force herself to keep her distance as Lucy pours more ethanol over the bite on her husband’s shoulder and Rick winces in pain. Amy sets up the transfusion and holds the IV bag until all of the blood inside has been given to Duane.

Morgan looks at Jacqui, who’s holding a revolver like someone who doesn’t know how to shoot. “Thank you,” he tells her sadly, “for doing what I couldn’t.”

Amy frowns. “What happened?” she asks.

“I shot her,” Jacqui whispers, her voice flat and numb. “I shot my sister in the head.”

Rick narrows his eyes at her. “What?” he says.

“Morgan was married to…” Jacqui swallows hard and shudders as Andrea comes to hold her while she cries, “…to Jenny, my sister. Duane’s my nephew. Jenny’s dead. Oh god, Jenny’s dead.”

* * *

It’s too dangerous to stay in the street. There’s blood curdling in the humid air, and zombies can sniff out their prey. Morgan invites them all into his home, the boarded-up windows and piles of opened cans scattered on the floor a strange contrast with the idyllic white picket fence outside. Duane and Rick are both running low-grade fevers, but nothing high enough to indicate a fatal immunoresponse or internal hemorrhaging. Morgan gets up and goes to sit in the other room with them while he eats.

“I tried to do everything right, to keep these people safe,” Rick tells Morgan shakily. “We have to move on. Atlanta’s done. We’re facing a long hard journey. Maybe even harder than I can imagine, but it can’t be harder than our journey’s been so far. I’m trying not to lose faith. I can’t. There’s just a few of us now. We’ve got to stick together, fight for each other, be willing to lay down our lives for each other. That’s what lies ahead. We need you, Morgan. I ask, and you answer. Will you come with us?”

Morgan nods, slowly. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I will.”

Lucy makes potato apple bake in her trailer and they eat a home-cooked meal around a table. After all, they’ve been fighting tooth and nail to survive for months and that means they’ve earned some comfort food. Amy is keeping an eye on Duane and Rick while she eats. Lucy is trying to ignore the fervent way everyone around the table is looking at her.

“How long did it take for you to fight off the infection the first time you were bitten?” Lori wants to know.

Lucy shrugs. “I’m not sure,” she mumbles. “I had a fever of a hundred and four and I had no idea I was going to survive. I was bitten sometime in the afternoon, I was sick all night, and I was fine the next morning.”

Lori sighs. “You’re sure he’s immune?” she asks.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly. “I’m sure he didn’t have any viral symbionts in his system until this morning,” she answers, “and he should’ve died of septic shock before he had a chance to come out of his coma. I think he got infected with the HZV-B strain of the virus in the hospital and he fought it off while he was sleeping.”

Lori frowns at her. “You’re saying he’s been immune this whole time,” she says incredulously.

Lucy makes a frustrated noise because she hates not knowing everything for sure. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’m just trying to explain how he survived. Rick was in that hospital surrounded by the infected with an open wound in his chest for almost six weeks. HZV-B is contagious enough that people spontaneously amplified even if they weren’t bitten or scratched. I think he must’ve gotten infected while he was sleeping, but he got better and that’s why he woke up.”

Lori takes another bite of potato apple bake. “This is really good,” she tells her once she’s done chewing. “Thank you.”

Lucy is the worst at social cues, but she’s perspicacious enough to know Lori isn’t just thanking her for the food. “You’re welcome,” she mumbles. When she looks up, Daryl is still looking at her like he only has eyes for her. Lucy blushes and bites her lip before she looks back at him instead of shying away.

It’s the beginning of the end.


End file.
